Saints and Scholars

by Terry Eagleton

Overview

In 1916, in a remote cottage on the west coast of Ireland, an unlikely collection of fugitives gathers. Ludwig Wittgenstein has run away from Cambridge and English insularity. His traveling companion, Nikolai Bakhtin (brother of the Marxist aesthetician), has been through the gamut of revolutionary sects and is now devoting himself to gluttony. Into their retreat stumble James Connolly, now on the run from the British government, and Leopold Bloom, fleeing Ulysses and his broken marriage. Being men of ideas, they begin to talk. And then, being men of principles, they begin to argue ...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780860915393
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/01/1987
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Terry Eagleton is Professor of Cultural Theory and John Rylands Fellow, University of Manchester. His other books include Ideology; The Function of Criticism; Heathcliff and the Great Hunger; Against the Grain; Walter Benjamin; and Criticism and Ideology, all from Verso.

Editorial Reviews

Sheer fun and sadness welling up out of critical intelligence.”—George Steiner, Sunday Times Books of the Year

“Ingenious, erudite and entertaining.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Wonderfully funny ... brilliant.”—Publishers Weekly

“Savagely comic ... Written with real passion.”—Sunday Times

From the Publisher

Ludwig Wittgenstein does not seem a likely candidate for fictionalization, yet here is the second novel in recent months to feature him. While Bruce Duffy's The World as I Found It ( LJ 8/87) was epic, this first novel is an extended philosophical debate among several luminaries from real life and fiction. The novel begins promisingly with an exact and brutal depiction of the execution of James Connolly, leader of Ireland's Easter Rising. It then proposes to ``arrest the bullets in mid air,'' launching a fantasy that ends with a querulous Wittgenstein discussing the relative merits of revolution with Connolly. An interesting character study, but the philosophical issues are not sharply rendered. And it is hard to accept this Wittgenstein as perhaps the greatest mind in 20th-century philosophy. Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''

Library Journal