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The CounterfeitersAuthor: Hugh Kenner Scholarly Series October 2005 174 pages, 5 x 8 Paperback, 1-56478-416-9 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $11.16 
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Book Description
Wide-ranging enough to encompass Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, horses, and a man riding a bicycle while wearing a gas mask, The Counterfeiters is one of Hugh Kenner's greatest achievements. In this fascinating work of literary and cultural criticism, Kenner seeks the causes and outcomes of man's ability to simulate himself (a computer that can calculate quicker than we can) and his world (a mechanical duck that acts the same as a living one).
This intertangling of art and science, of man and machine, of machine and art is at the heart of this book. He argues that the belief in art as a uniquely human expression is complicated and questioned by the prevalence of simulations—or "counterfeits"—in our culture. Kenner, with his characteristically accessible style and wit, brings together history, literature, science, and art to locate the personal in what is an increasingly counterfeit world.
About the Author
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Hugh Kenner (1923-2003)—born in Ontario, Canada—was one of the greatest literary critics of the twentieth century. He taught at several universities during his lifetime and was a frequent contributor to the National Review. His numerous critical books include The Pound Era, Joyce's Voices, Gnomon, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study, and Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians. |
Praise
"Hugh Kenner's new book is so full of a number of things . . . and so unconfined by the conventional limits of these specialties that the temptation would be to call it a tour de force . . . But it is hard to call a tour de force a work whose impact is as evident and just as the sun on a clear morning."—Arlene Croce, National Review"Kenner is able as few are to show us a style, a signature, a way of being literary that can transform the world of soup cans and dead authors 'into a sort of word, totally inexplicit, totally assertive, inexplicably permanent.'"—Roger Sale, Hudson Review
"This is one of the best short books of literary criticism that I know."—Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
More Information
Also by Hugh Kenner:Flaubert, Joyce and Beckett: The Stoic Comedians
Joyce's Voices