Works
Brown's commentary on Hesiod's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth, showed a Marxist tendency. Brown supported Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy for president in 1948. Following Brown's disenchantment with politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he studied the works of Sigmund Freud. This culminated in his classic 1959 work, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. The book's fame grew when Norman Podhoretz recommended it to Lionel Trilling.
Love's Body, published in 1966, examined "the role of erotic love in human history, describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization." The book was criticized by Herbert Marcuse in "Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown", an article published in February 1967 in Commentary. Brown's "A Reply to Herbert Marcuse" was published by Commentary in March 1967.
In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester, Brown moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, as professor of humanities, teaching in the Boards of Studies in History of Consciousness and Literature. He was a highly popular professor, known to friends and students alike as "Nobby". The range of courses he taught, while broadly focused around the themes of poetics, mythology, and psychoanalysis, included classes on Finnegans Wake, Islam, and, with Carl Schorske, Goethe's Faust.
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, published in 1991, was an anthology that collected many of Brown's later writings. It contained "Dionysus in 1990", an article in which Brown used the work of Georges Bataille, whom he described as a "fellow traveler on the Dionysian path", to develop a post-Marxist critique of political economy.
In The Challenge of Islam, a collection of lectures given in 1981 and published in 2009, Brown argues that Islam challenges us to make life a work of art. Drawing on Henri Corbin’s The Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, he argues that "Muhammad is the bridge between Christ and Dante and Blake.”
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“My plan of instruction is extremely simple and limited. They learn, on week-days, such coarse works as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.”
—Hannah More (1745–1833)
“To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)