Is it possible to create art freely today and yet produce works that are more than merely decorative or commercial? asks Gabriel Josipovici in this wide-ranging book. The suspicion that art is both frivolous and deceptive has a relatively short history, he explains, and he turns to works created in "cultures of trust"-Homer, the Hebrew Bible, Dante, and Shakespeare-in order to understand Romantic suspicion.

In this new book, a preeminent literary thinker muses over the central question of how we can feel at home in the world, given that the world is independent of and indifferent to our wishes. Drawing on books and films, cultural history and his own experiences, Gabriel Josipovici argues that it is possible to feel comfortable in the world and in our relationships with others only if we value touch over sight, if we respect distance but also work to overcome it. Josipovici moves from a Charlie Chaplin film to passages from Proust, from the world of sport to the world of addiction, from medieval pilgrimages to the cult of relics, from a wedding photograph of his grandparents to some of Chardin's most enigmatic paintings. Through these seemingly disparate topics he provides engaging and wise commentary on connection and communication in life. Contrasting the senses of sight and touch, Josipovici notes that although sight seems to give us the totality of what we behold, it is only when we walk or feel our way across the distances that things become more than images and begin to constitute the world in which we, as touchers and not mere observers, are included. If we depend on sight - which seems to offer a frictionless domination over reality - we may avoid the pains and uncertainties of living, but we also lose our involvement with life.

Two central themes run through this new collection of authoritative and undogmatic essays: the Jewish experience and that of the work of art as a toy to be used for dreaming and playing rather than as a window to the world. The collection includes three essays on the Bible, as well as pieces devoted to Twelfth Night, Rembrandt's self-portraits, Tristram Shandy, Kafka's stories and aphorisms, Borges, Kierkegaard, and painter Andrez Jackowski. The title essay examines the relationship of the artists' works and their ideas, and the book concludes with personal meditations on memory, the Holocaust, Jewishness, and being a writer-teacher.

The quality of today's literary writing arouses the strongest opinions. For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing--a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why. Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization of a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art arriving at a consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or even 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism's key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected--including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions not only about national taste, but about contemporary culture itself. Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing and writing about other writers. This book is a strident call to arms and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.