Thursday, October 9, 2008

Interview with Nobel Prize Winner

France Diplomatie has an interview in English with Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature. A few gems:

Can literature affect this chaos, transform it?
We no longer have the presumptuousness to believe, as they did in Sartre’s day, that a novel can change the world. Today, writers can only record their political impotence.

Why are you so fascinated by other cultures?
Western culture has become too monolithic. It places the greatest possible emphasis on its urban and technical side thus preventing the development of other forms of expression: religiosity and feelings, for example. The entire unknowable part of the human being is obscured in the name of rationalism. It is my awareness of this that has pushed me towards other civilisations.

Check out the full interview here.

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