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Searching for Cioran Hardcover – Download: Adobe Reader, January 7, 2009
| Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Kenneth R. Johnston (Editor) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's critical biography of the Romanian-born French philosopher E. M. Cioran focuses on his crucial formative years as a mystical revolutionary attracted to right-wing nationalist politics in interwar Romania, his writings of this period, and his self-imposed exile to France in 1937. This move led to his transformation into one of the most famous French moralists of the 20th century. As an enthusiast of the anti-rationalist philosophies widely popular in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century, Cioran became an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard. In her quest to understand how Cioran and other brilliant young intellectuals could have been attracted to such passionate national revival movements, Zarifopol-Johnston, herself a Romanian emigré, sought out the aging philosopher in Paris in the early 1990s and retraced his steps from his home village of Rasinari and youthful years in Sibiu, through his student years in Bucharest and Berlin, to his early residence in France. Her portrait of Cioran is complemented by an engaging autobiographical account of her rediscovery of her own Romanian past.
- Print length312 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherIndiana University Press
- Publication dateJanuary 7, 2009
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions6.14 x 0.75 x 9.21 inches
- ISBN-109780253352675
- ISBN-13978-0253352675
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Editorial Reviews
Review
[Searching for Cioran] tells the story of his Romanian years and gives a fine account of the personal and political circumstances in which both his philosophical ideas and his brand of nationalism were formed. November 11, 2010
― The New York Review of BooksThis is a graceful study of a disputed period in Cioran's intellectual biography and personal life. With subtle sophistication and intimate knowledge of the subject . . . the author has sought to recreate Cioran's Romanian roots and his local and universal intellectual sources, in what, it was hoped, would become Cioran's ultimate scholarly biography. . . . Although the author's untimely death precluded the book's completion, no one will deny that what Zarifopol-Johnston has achieved is arguably one of the most audacious analyses to date of Cioran's life and writings. One can only hope that future studies will be as compelling and provacative, and thus complete the ambitious scholarly agenda set up by Zarifopol-Johnston.Spring 2010
― Slavic ReviewZarifopol-Johnston seeks to understand Cioran rather than accuse him. . . . [She] points out both continuities and rifts between the thought of the 'Romanian' Cioran and the 'French' Cioran. . . . Searching for Cioran offers valuable material about an important writer's early life.January 25, 2009
― Washington postReview
An important and distinctly original contribution to the growing field of Cioran studies. . . . [Zarifopol-Johnston] is a sharp, insightful observer of self and others, courageous and candid, writing in a fresh, quick-silver style.
-- from the Foreword by Matei CalinescuAbout the Author
Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (1952–2005) was Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. She translated two books by E. M. Cioran from Romanian, On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints, and is author of To Kill a Text: The Dialogic Fiction of Hugo, Dickens and Zola.
Kenneth R. Johnston is Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is author of The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy and co-editor of Romantic Revolutions: Criticism and Theory (IUP, 1990). He lives in Chicago, Illinois.
From The Washington Post
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Product details
- ASIN : 0253352673
- Publisher : Indiana University Press; Illustrated edition (January 7, 2009)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 312 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780253352675
- ISBN-13 : 978-0253352675
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 1.45 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.14 x 0.75 x 9.21 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,630,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #73 in Eastern European Literary Criticism (Books)
- #1,328 in Philosopher Biographies
- #2,824 in Modern Philosophy (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Kenneth R. Johnston is Ruth N. Halls Professor of English Emeritus at Indiana University, where he chaired the English department and won awards for teaching. He has also taught at Colorado, Bucharest, and Georgetown universities. "Wordsworth and 'The Recluse'" was published by Yale UP in 1984. "The Hidden Wordsworth" was awarded the 1998 Barricelli Prize for outstanding contribution to Romantic studies, and was named a Book of the Year by the New York Times, The Guardian and other papers. Johnston's adaptation of James Hogg's "Love Adventures of Mr. George Cochrane" was directed by Lady Judy Steel at the 1993 Scottish Borders Festival. In 2013, Oxford UP published "Unusual Suspects: Pitt's Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s." Johnston received the Distinguished Scholar award of the Keats-Shelley Association of America in 2015. "Counterfactual Romanticism" (2019) contains his essay, "Lord Byron reads 'The Prelude.'" He has held Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEH and Mellon fellowships. He resides in Chicago and London.

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Almost all of Cioran's works are now available in English translation (with the sore exceptions of his 1930s political tract "Romania's Transfiguration" and the "Cahiers" (Notebooks), but until the appearance of this book penned by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, the capable translator of his Romanian-language works who sadly died in 2005, and which in turn was completed by her husband, Kenneth Johnston, there was for English-language readers nothing like a biography or a critical study of his work that was intended for general audiences. Prior to that, if you wanted to know anything about Cioran's life or intellectual development, then you had to cobble together the scraps provided in some of the introductions accompanying the translated works or wade through a handful of ponderous academic monographs not always written in English.
This book is still not a full and comprehensive study of Cioran's life or his output as a writer since it focuses on the early Cioran, from his birth in 1911 to the time of his departure from Romania and arrival in the West, taking him through Germany and finally to Paris, where he would spend the rest of his life from 1937 until his death in 1995, but it is a marvelous study in its own right full of critical insights and sympathetic enough examinations of the man's own inner workings and authorial obsessions. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston was ideally suited for writing an intellectual biography of the man, but her own untimely death cut the project short and the materials she had assembled for the second half of the book intended to deal with the later "French" Cioran had to be collected and edited by her husband.
But in its own ironic way the latter half of the book, which is largely anecdotal in nature and deals with her own personal encounters and interviews with Cioran in Paris (they include a searing account of Cioran's decline into the mental oblivion of Alzheimer's disease), and though it lacks the more comprehensive biographical treatment of the earlier narratives, it forms a fascinating supplement to the fuller "Romanian" sections precisely because the episodes it contains are fragmentary and thus serve to reflect certain aspects of the existence that Cioran cultivated in his self-imposed state of anonymous exile from his homeland.
Finally, we should be forever grateful to Zarifopol-Johnston for the way in which she deals head-on with the cloudy issue of Cioran's political beliefs and activities, and she comes to some compelling conclusions that allow her to transcend the stale and hypocritical pieties that govern what Milan Kundera has described as the ""absolute tribunal mentality" of the twentieth century" (p. 114). The two chapters in this book that deal with Cioran's so-called fascist sympathies and his seeming enthusiasm for totalitarianism as expressed in his still untranslated work "Romania's Transfiguration" are, in my opinion, the best and most illuminating in the book, especially when they are read in connection with the first half's final chapter, "Conclusion: The Lyrical Virtues of Totalitarianism".
(Note: I continue to be flabbergasted by the self-seeking liberties taken by publishers who do not hesitate to print the most false and misleading things about the books they are offering. The dustjacket of this otherwise excellent work bears the description: "A critical portrait of French philosopher and mystic E.M. Cioran". It is simply wrong on three counts--Cioran was not French, he steadfastly refused to be called a philosopher, and if he knew that someone was labelling him a mystic he would have laughed himself silly.)



