{ "item_title" : "Goethe, Faust and the Deconstruction of Genius", "item_author" : [" Boris Kriger "], "item_description" : "Everyone agrees that Goethe was a genius. The trouble starts when you ask where the genius is. Was it in the life - the prodigy who made half of Europe weep over a lovesick young man, the minister who ran a duchy's mines and roads and treasury, the scientist who picked a fight with Newton, the sage of Weimar visited by Napoleon? Or is it in the poem he carried for most of his life and refused to let anyone read the end of while he was alive?This book puts the question as a fork and tests both prongs. It takes Goethe's life apart with a formal method for the deconstruction of biographical narrative, starting with the most suspicious fact about it: the man wrote his own memoirs and titled them Poetry and Truth. It reads the legal files behind the most famous seduction in German literature, and the vote a poet cast as a minister of state. Then it walks through Faust scene by scene, from a wager borrowed from the Book of Job to a devil who can do everything except think outside his own frame, from paper money printed by magic to an artificial man sealed in a glass bottle, and listens to the verse itself - how a rhyme makes a promise, how a pause becomes a fact, and how Helen of Troy is taught to rhyme on stage.What it finds at the end is smaller and stranger than a legend. The most famous soul in European literature is saved, or lost, by a single shift in the mood of one verb. Who put it there, and whether he knew what he was doing, turns out to be the best answer anyone has given to the question of where genius lives.Witty where Goethe is witty, plain where he is cruel, and fond of him throughout, this is a book for readers who have always meant to read Faust and would like a friend to walk them through it.Keywords: Goethe, Faust, deconstruction, genius, biography, poetry, literature", "item_img_path" : "https://covers3.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/9/79/816/405/9798164055066_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "27.00", "online_price" : "27.00", "our_price" : "27.00", "club_price" : "27.00", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "" } }

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