Author Description

Product Description "Killing a genius, a cosmopolitan with the erudition to enlighten and delight us, is hardly new in the annals of world history. Nevertheless, the assassination of Ioan Petru Culianu in May 1991 at the University of Chicago, not quite two years after Romanians toppled the Ceausescus from power and with them the Marxist-Stalinist regime, was a shock. It was a loss that continues to reverberate in academic, journalistic, intellectual and political circles. It evokes a memory of lost possibilities, of senselessness, of banality. Culianu’s many-faceted, already enormous oeuvre accomplished at the still tender age of 41 is seldom studied and most certainly not in the crisscrossing context of his literaturary, political essaystic, scholarly and other work. As a scholar, for instance, as Ted Anton (“The Killing of Professor Culianu,” in Lingua Franca, September/October 1992) writes, Culianu’s research expanded “beyond the study of religion, working to recast our concepts of magic, sex, death and the self. His interests ranged widely – from the study of multiple universes to the mind’s phantasms, from literary theory to the spiritual techniques of ecstasy.” Thus, Adriana Listes Pop dares to tackle what seems like an impossible task. The result of her labors is a comprehensive assessment of the work of a man who was so much more than a scholar, a dissident, a writer, a thinker and invariably, therefore, also a provocateur. She unveils the depth and complexities of the varied lives the multi-lingual Romanian who settled in Chicago, but was still so very much involved in the struggles of his native country, concurrently lived. Culianu’s lives were infused with his never-ending curiosity, inventiveness, and critical thinking. Adriana Listes Pop dissects his works and provides us with a narrative of his thinking, and its multiple ways and avenues in which it was expressed. More than that, she offers an explanation of how the various lines of Culi