Mother tongues

Sinopse

"Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Sylvia Plath make up the odd trio on which this book is based. It is in the surprising and revealing links between them - links pertaining to troublesome mothers, elusive foreign languages, and professional disappointments - that Barbara Johnson maps the coordinates of her larger claims about the ideal of oneness in every area of life, and about the damage done by this ideal."--Jacket.