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Levi's compulsion to record the Holocaust.
Italian writer Primo Levi's account of Auschwitz If This Is A Man is recognised as one of the essential books of mankind. No other work interrogates our moral history so incisively or conveys more profoundly the horror of the Nazi genocide. On 11 April 1987, Levi fell to his death in the house where he was born. This book presents his biography.
This collection represents some of the latest research on Primo Levi, the famous Auschwitz survivor Italian author, in the field of Italian Studies, Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, literary theory, philosophy, and ethics. The author has collected an impressive group of scholars, including Ian Thomson, who has published a well-received biography of Levi in the UK (a US edition is due this year); Alexander Stille, who is a staff writer got the New Yorker as well as for the New York Times (he is also the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism ); and David Mendel, who knew Levi and had an extensive correspondence with the Italian writer. There are four essays on Levi's complex and fertile theory of the 'Gray Zone' and further essays on the myriad aspects of this thought. This is an excellent collection with new perspectives and interpretations of the life and work of Primo Levi.
Primo Levi has been identified in the public mind as the supreme witness to the barbarism that was the Nazi Holocaust but he was ambivalent about having that role thrust upon him. He also wished to be judged as a writer who, in addition to the autobiographical works on his experiences in the death camps, wrote poetry, produced volumes of sci-fi stories, authored novels and contributed critical essays to newspapers on a range of topics and writers. No one has the right to ignore or downplay the 'testimony' Primo Levi offered, but it is time to examine the wider vision inherent in his work and to explore the tradition in which he operated. Levi was one of the great wisdom writers of his age, whose ethical authority, somewhat to his own embarrassment, was accepted in many fields. Several contributors to this collection of essays see him as a proponent of Enlightenment values, or as heir to a longer Humanist tradition. Even after enduring Auschwitz, he held fast to a notion of the dignity of the human person, and no man did more to re-establish, however quizzically, the secular basis for such beliefs. His overall standing as writer is the subject of this book.
Perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the death camps, Primo Levi is known for "Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, " and the classic "The Periodic Table." Angier has spent nearly ten years writing this meticulously researched, vivid, and moving biography.
A work by the Italian-Jewish writer, Primo Levi. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.
As one of the best-known survivors of the concentration camps, Primo Levi's testimony to his experiences in Auschwitz is internationally recognised as one of the most significant works of the last century. This volume examines each of Levi's works in detail, assessing and analysing the influence of Levi's time in Auschwitz on his writing. It identifies a variety of thematic, temporal, stylistic and linguistic echoes of Levi's concentration camp testimony, and traces these echoes throughout his subsequent, apparently unrelated, work. The book provides original and fascinating insights into the works of this remarkable writer, giving readers a new understanding and perspective on the immense significance and the pervasive influence of the holocaust on Levi's creative output.
This innovative reading of Primo Levi’s work offers the first sustained analysis in English of his representations of bodies and embodiment. Discussion spans the range of Levi’s works — from testimony to journalism, from essays to science fiction stories — identifying and tracing multiple narratives of embodiment and disembodiment across his oeuvre. These narratives range from the abject, disembodied condition of prisoners in Auschwitz, to posthuman or cyborg individuals, whose bodies merge with technological devices. Levi’s representations of bodies are explored in relation to theories of embodiment and posthumanism, bringing his work into new dialogue with critical discourses on ...
At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist from Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust of World War II and sent to die in the German concentration camp in Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books, essays, short stories, poetry, and a novel, in which he painstakingly described the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz. He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed. In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more impor...
'One of the best literary biographies of the year...superb... Levi, I think, would have appreciated it' Observer Re-issued to mark the centenary of Primo Levi’s birth, now featuring a new introduction from the author. Discover the definitive biography of the iconic writer and Holocaust survivor. On 11 April 1987 the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi fell to his death in the house where he was born. More than forty years after his rescue from a Nazi concentration camp, it seemed that Levi had taken his own life. His account of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man, is recognised as one of the essential books of mankind. Ian Thomson spent over ten years in Italy and elsewhere researching and writing this matchless biography. This incomparable book unravels the strands of a life caught between the factory and the typewriter, family and friends. Deeply researched, it sheds new light on Levi's recurring depressions and unearths vital information about his premature death.