Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Total similar authors (28)

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  Thomas Browne

  Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English polymath and author of works on various subjects, including science, medicine, religion and esoteric.
  
  Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry. Browne's literary works are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffering from melancholia, his writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour, while his literary style is varied, according to genre, resulting in a rich, unique prose which ranges from rough notebook observations to polished Baroque eloquence.
  
  After graduating M.A. from Broadgates Hall, Oxfor

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  Harold Bloom

  Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
  Bloom was a defender of the traditional Western canon at a time when literature departments were focusing on what he deri

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  Jorge Luis Borges

  Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
  Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genèv

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  William Shakespeare

  William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.
  Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, W

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  Michel Foucault

  Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
  Born in Poitiers, France, into an upper-middle-class family, Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV, at the École Normale Supérieure, where he developed an intere

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  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister

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  Du Fu

  Du Fu (Chinese: 杜甫, 712–770) was one of China's greatest poets and a central figure in the literary tradition of the Tang dynasty, often hailed as the "Poet Sage" (詩聖) for his moral integrity and the depth of his work. His poetry, numbering over 1,400 surviving pieces, captures the essence of his turbulent era, blending historical insight, personal struggle, and a deep concern for humanity.
  Born into a scholarly family, Du Fu was well-educated in the Confucian classics and aspired to a government career. However, his attempts to gain a stable official position were largely unsuccessful. He experienced firsthand the chaos of the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763), which devastated the Tang empire, displacing millions and leading to widespread suff

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  David Foster Wallace

  David Foster Wallace was an acclaimed American writer known for his fiction, nonfiction, and critical essays that explored the complexities of consciousness, irony, and the human condition. Widely regarded as one of the most innovative literary voices of his generation, Wallace is perhaps best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which was listed by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005. His unfinished final novel, The Pale King, was published posthumously in 2011 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
  Born in Ithaca, New York, Wallace was raised in Illinois, where he excelled as both a student and a junior tennis player—a sport he later wrote about with sharp insight and humor. H

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  Sylvia Plath

  Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she demonstrated literary talent from an early age, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her early life was shaped by the death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was eight years old, a trauma that would profoundly influence her later work.
  Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study

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  Martin Heidegger

  Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) was a German philosopher whose work is perhaps most readily associated with phenomenology and existentialism, although his thinking should be identified as part of such philosophical movements only with extreme care and qualification. His ideas have exerted a seminal influence on the development of contemporary European philosophy. They have also had an impact far beyond philosophy, for example in architectural theory (see e.g., Sharr 2007), literary criticism (see e.g., Ziarek 1989), theology (see e.g., Caputo 1993), psychotherapy (see e.g., Binswanger 1943/1964, Guignon 1993) and cognitive science (see e.g., Dreyfus 1992, 2008; Wheeler 2005; Kiverstein and Wheeler forthcoming).

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  Witold Gombrowicz

  Gombrowicz was born in Małoszyce, in Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy gentry family. He was the youngest of four children of Jan and Antonina (née Kotkowska.) In 1911 his family moved to Warsaw. After completing his education at Saint Stanislaus Kostka's Gymnasium in 1922, he studied law at Warsaw University (in 1927 he obtained a master’s degree in law.) Gombrowicz spent a year in Paris where he studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales; although he was less than diligent in his studies his time in France brought him in constant contact with other young intellectuals. He also visited the Mediterranean.
  
  When he returned to Poland he began applying for legal positions with little success. In the 1920s he started wr

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  Blaise Pascal

  Early work of Blaise Pascal of France included the invention of the adding machine and syringe and the co-development with Pierre de Fermat of the mathematical theory of probability; later, he, a Jansenist, wrote on philosophy and theology, notably as collected in the posthumous Pensées (1670).
  
  This contemporary of René Descartes attained ten years of age in 1633, when people forced Galileo Galilei to recant his belief that Earth circled the Sun. He lived in Paris at the same time, when Thomas Hobbes in 1640 published his famous Leviathan (1651). Together, Pascal created the calculus.
  
  A near-fatal carriage accident in November 1654 persuaded him to turn his intellect finally toward religion. The story goes that on the proverbial dark

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  Anatole France

  French critic Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole François Thibault wrote sophisticated, often satirical short stories and novels, including Penguin Island (1908), and won the Nobel Prize of 1921 for literature.
  
  Anatole France began his career as a poet and a journalist. From 1867, he as a journalist composed articles and notices.
  
  In 1869, Le Parnasse Contemporain published La Part de Madeleine of his poems. In 1875, he sat on the committee in charge of the third such compilation. He moved Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé aside.
  
  Skeptical old scholar Sylvester Bonnard, protagonist of famous Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard (1881), embodied own personality of the author. The academy praised its elegant prose.
  
  Anatole

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  Thomas Browne

  Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English polymath and author of works on various subjects, including science, medicine, religion and esoteric.
  
  Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry. Browne's literary works are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffering from melancholia, his writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour, while his literary style is varied, according to genre, resulting in a rich, unique prose which ranges from rough notebook observations to polished Baroque eloquence.
  
  After graduating M.A. from Broadgates Hall, Oxfor

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  Maurice Blanchot

  Maurice Blanchot was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. Blanchot was a distinctly modern writer who broke down generic boundaries, particularly between literature and philosophy. He began his career as a journalist on the political far right, but the experience of fascism altered his thinking to the point that he supported the student protests of May 1968. Like so many members of his generation, Blanchot was influenced by Alexandre Kojeve's humanistic interpretation of Hegel and the rise of modern existentialism. His “Literature and the Right to Death” shows the influence that Heidegger had on a whole generation of French intellectuals.

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  Emil M. Cioran

  Born in 1911 in Rășinari, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, raised under the rule of a father who was a Romanian Orthodox priest and a mother who was prone to depression, Emil Cioran wrote his first five books in Romanian. Some of these are collections of brief essays (one or two pages, on average); others are collections of aphorisms. Suffering from insomnia since his adolescent years in Sibiu, the young Cioran studied philosophy in the “little Paris” of Bucarest.
  
  A prolific publicist, he became a well-known figure, along with Mircea Eliade, Constantin Noïca, and his future close friend Eugene Ionesco (with whom he shared the Royal Foundation’s Young Writers Prize in 1934 for his first book, On the Heights of Despair).

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  Václav Havel

  Václav Havel was a Czech playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and politician. He was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993–2003). He wrote over twenty plays and numerous non-fiction works, translated internationally. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Philadelphia Liberty Medal, the Order of Canada, the freedom medal of the Four Freedoms Award, and the Ambassador of Conscience Award. He was also voted 4th in Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals. He was a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.
  
  Beginning in the 1960s, his work turned to focus on the politics of Czechoslovaki

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  Helen DeWitt

  Helen DeWitt (born 1957 in Takoma Park, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.) is a novelist.
  
  DeWitt grew up primarily in South America (Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador), as her parents worked in the United States diplomatic service. After a year at Northfield Mount Hermon School and two short periods at Smith College, DeWitt studied classics at the University of Oxford, first at Lady Margaret Hall, and then at Brasenose College for her D.Phil.
  
  DeWitt is best known for her acclaimed debut novel, The Last Samurai. She held a variety of jobs while struggling to finish a book, including a dictionary text tagger, a copytaker, and Dunkin' Donuts employee, she also worked in a laundry service. During this time she reportedly attempted to fini

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  Marcel Proust

  Marcel Proust was a French novelist, best known for his 3000 page masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past or In Search of Lost Time), a pseudo-autobiographical novel told mostly in a stream-of-consciousness style.
  
  Born in the first year of the Third Republic, the young Marcel, like his narrator, was a delicate child from a bourgeois family. He was active in Parisian high society during the 80s and 90s, welcomed in the most fashionable and exclusive salons of his day. However, his position there was also one of an outsider, due to his Jewishness and homosexuality. Towards the end of 1890s Proust began to withdraw more and more from society, and although he was never entirely reclusive, as is sometimes made out,

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  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust , published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scientific research in various fields, notably botany, and held several governmental positions.
  
  George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Works span the fields of literature, theology, and humanism.
  People laud this magnum opus as one of the peaks of world literature. Other well-known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther .
  
  With this key figure of German literature, th

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  Olga Tokarczuk

  Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk is a Polish writer, activist, and public intellectual. She is one of the most critically acclaimed and successful authors of her generation in Poland. She was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Polish female prose writer for "a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life".
  
  For her novel Flights, Tokarczuk was awarded the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. For Flights and The Books of Jacob, she won the Nike Awards, Poland's top literary prize, among other accolades; she won the Nike audience award five times.
  
  Her works have been translated into almost 40 languages, making her one of the most translated contemporary Polish writers. The

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  Pío Baroja

  Pío Baroja y Nessi (1872-1956) nació en San Sebastián y vivió durante casi toda su vida en Madrid, donde estudió Medicina. Su ejercicio como médico fue breve, en Cestona. Volvió a Madrid, donde entró en contacto con Azorín y Maeztu, que le llevaron a entregarse a la literatura, su gran vocación.
  Publicó sus primeros libros en 1900 tras una serie de colaboraciones en diarios y revistas. Siguió una etapa de intensa labor que conjugó con viajes por España y Europa. En 1911 publicó El árbol de la ciencia. Hasta entonces había publicado ya, además de cuentos, artículos y ensayos, diecisiete novelas que constituyen lo más importante de su producción. Su fama se consolidó y su vida se consagró a escribir, volviéndose cada vez más sedentaria. En 193

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  Gerald Murnane

  Murnane's first two books, Tamarisk Row (1974) and A Lifetime on Clouds (1976), seem to be semi-autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adolescence. Both are composed largely of very long but grammatical sentences.
  
  In 1982, he attained his mature style with The Plains, a short novel about a young filmmaker who travels to a fictive country far within Australia, where his failure to make a film is perhaps his most profound achievement. The novel is both a metaphysical parable about appearance and reality, and a parodic examination of traditions and cultural horizons. The novel depicts an abstracted Australia, akin to something out of mythology or fable. The novel was followed by: Landscape With Landscape (1985), Inland (1988), Velvet Wa

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  Albert Camus

  Works, such as the novels The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), of Algerian-born French writer and philosopher Albert Camus concern the absurdity of the human condition; he won the Nobel Prize of 1957 for literature.
  
  Origin and his experiences of this representative of non-metropolitan literature in the 1930s dominated influences in his thought and work.
  
  He also adapted plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Dino Buzzati, and Requiem for a Nun of William Faulkner. One may trace his enjoyment of the theater back to his membership in l'Equipe, an Algerian group, whose "collective creation" Révolte dans les Asturies (1934) was banned for political reasons.
  
  Of semi-proletarian parents, early attached to intellectu

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  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Фёдор Михайлович Достоевский (Russian)
  
  Works, such as the novels Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), of Russian writer Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky or Dostoevski combine religious mysticism with profound psychological insight.
  
  Very influential writings of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin included Problems of Dostoyevsky's Works (1929),
  
  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky composed short stories, essays, and journals. His literature explores humans in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century and engages with a variety of philosophies and themes. People most acclaimed his Demons(1872) .
  
  Many literary critics rate him among the greatest authors of worl

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  Kenzaburō Ōe

  Kenzaburō Ōe (大江 健三郎) was a major figure in contemporary Japanese literature. His works, strongly influenced by French and American literature and literary theory, engages with political, social and philosophical issues including nuclear weapons, social non-conformism and existentialism.
  
  Ōe was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994 for creating "an imagined world, where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."

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  François de La Rochefoucauld

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.
  
  Other authors publishing under this name are:
  
  François de la Rochefoucauld
  
  François VI, duc de la Rochefoucauld, prince de Marcillac (French: [fʁɑ̃swa d(ə) la ʁɔʃfuko]; 15 September 1613 – 17 March 1680) was a noted French author of maxims and memoirs. It is said that his world-view was clear-eyed and urbane, and that he neither condemned human conduct nor sentimentally celebrated it. Born in Paris on the Rue des Petits Champs, at a time when the royal court was vacillating between aiding the nobility and threatening it, he was considered an exemplar of the accomplished 17th-century noblema

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  C.P. Snow

  Known British scientist Charles Percy Snow, baron Snow of Leicester, wrote especially his 11-volume series Strangers and Brothers (1940-1970).
  
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._P._Snow
  

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