In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, 1830-1980

The lines of demarcation separating the heroic from the antiheroic, according to Brombert, a renowned comparativist who teaches at Princeton, have become blurred over the past 100 years. Hero worship has become unfashionable as the witness has come to overshadow the hero. To demonstrate, Brombert examines the writings of B chner, Gogol, Dostoyevski, Flaubert, Svevo, Hasek, Frisch, Camus and Levi, in their original languages, which include French, German, Czech, Italian and Russian. Although he spends little time on Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, the eponymous antihero epitomizes the type--""a survival artist"" whose ""flaws are his strength."" Brombert traces the antihero back to Homer's Ulysses, whose goal is self-preservation and whose strategy emphasizes cunning, and sees the modern model best exemplified in Primo Levi as man and artist, in his rejection of moral absolutes and in his suspicion of any rhetoric that suggests victims as role models, whatever their saintliness. In some later chapters, however, the antihero plays a less prominent role, and the ideas, whatever their general interest, seem thrown in as filler. There is no closure to Brombert's argument--a shortcoming that makes this critique only a slight, albeit useful, overview of a vital theme in modern literature. (Apr.)