Responses to Modernity

"In addition to knowing his way around texts and ideas, Frank stresses human relationships as these are played out in intersecting careers and influential friendships... The life of literature is a continuing series of such dialogues between the living and the dead. This wise and generous book, culminating and recapitulating Frank's career, invites us to participate in the conversation and helps equip us with the knowledge to do so." -Times Literary Supplement "Joseph Frank has long enjoyed the status of an icon within literary study--first, through his epic five-volume study of Dostoevsky and, second, through his role as a public intellectual. The distinguished and often provocative essays in Responses to Modernity give ample testimony to this second role, in which, writing with his customary clarity and grace, he takes up such topics as the nature of literary realism and the temptation of Fascism for some famous intellectuals." -- -Herbert Lindenberger Stanford University "Joseph Frank, noted for his monumental biography of Dostoyevsky, is a critic of great cultural breadth, securely grounded in philosophy and in the literatures of America, Europe, and Russia. Responses to Modernity shows him at his best. What it does especially well is survey the intellectual life of France and Germany before and after World War II in the brilliant works that emerged from Europe's dark night, in the patter of ideological barkers inviting young minds to part the curtain and enter their tents, in the story of those who fought shy of radical creeds and of those who couldn't resist the lure of primitivism." -- -Fredrick Brown Professor Emeritus, University of Stony Brook, SUNY