The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka

In the French filmmaker Robert Bresson's cinematography, the linkage of fragmented, dissimilar images challenges our assumption thatweknow either what things are in themselves orthe infinite ways in which they are entangled.The "bond" of Sharon Cameron's title refers to the astonishing connections found both within Bresson'sfilms and across literary works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, whose visionary rethinkingsof experience are akin to Bresson's in their resistance to all forms of abstraction and classification thatsegregate aspects of reality.Whether exploring Bresson's efforts to reassess thelimitsof human reason and will, Dostoevsky's subversions of Christian conventions, Tolstoy's incompatible beliefs about death, or Kafka's focus on creatures neither human nor animal, Cameron illuminates how the repeatedjuxtapositionof disparate, even antithetical, phenomena carves out new approaches to defining the essence of being, one where the very nature of fixed categories is brought into question. An innovative look at a classic French auteur and three giants of European literature, The Bond of the Furthest Apart will interest scholars of literature, film, ethics, aesthetics, and anyone drawn to an experimental venture in critical thought.