Romain Rolland and the Politics of the Intellectual by David Fisher

This highbrow portrait of Romain Rolland (1866-1944)--French novelist, musicologist, dramatist, and Nobel prizewinner in 1915--focuses on his experiments with political dedication opposed to the backdrop of ecu historical past among the 2 international wars. top referred to as a biographer of Beethoven and for his novel, Jean-Christophe, Rolland used to be a type of nonconforming writers who perceived a quandary of bourgeois society in Europe earlier than the nice struggle, and who consciously labored to discredit and reshape that society within the interwar interval. reading Rolland's itinerary of engaged stands, David James Fisher clarifies features of eu cultural background and is helping decipher the ambiguities on the center of all sorts of highbrow engagement.Moving from textual content to context, Fisher organizes the publication round a sequence of debates--Rolland's private and non-private collisions over particular devoted stands--introducing the reader to the polemical form of French highbrow discourse and delivering perception into what it capability to be a dependable highbrow. Fisher provides Rolland's inner most ruminations, wide study, and reexamination of the functionality and elegance of the French guy of letters. He observes that Rolland experimented with 5 kinds of dedication: oceanic mysticism associated with innovative, democratic politics; unfastened considering associated with antiwar dissent; pacifism and, eventually, Gandhism; antifacism associated with anti-imperialism, antiracism, and all-out political resistance to fascism; and, so much controversially, fellow touring as a kind of socialist humanism and the confident part of antifascism. Fisher perspectives Rolland's engagement traditionally and significantly, displaying that engaged intellectuals of that point have been neither naive propagandists nor dupes of political parties.David James Fisher makes a case for the devoted author and hopes to rekindle the controversy approximately dedication. For him, Romain Rolland sums up engagement in a extraordinary, dialectical formula: