"[Cameron] teases out a more tenuous, more originally imagined thread of connections between the filmmaker and the writers. . .poetically imagined. . . .The achievement of this book, with its motley crew of gifted storytellers, is to extract from their art the imaginative resources to think and perceive, at least momentarily, outside blinkering, enculturated categories and ideas. . .Cameron's readings give sensuous form to philosophical concepts."

Modern Language Notes

"The enigmatic title of Sharon Cameron’s latest book offers a solution to a very basic problem in comparative literature, namely: when we compare literature across differences and find affinities we feel compelled to use materialist historicism, network analysis, and other narratives of circulation and synthesis to demonstrate the transmission of influence or else explain such coincidences as a parallel efflorescence. The Bond of the Furthest Apart models a transcendentalist approach to comparative literature anchored in Emerson’s notion of impersonal intimacy, its hermeneutics carried over and intensified from her two earlier books. . . .The Bond repeatedly enlists comparison to the mystery of experience—first as something that is not really yours, then as something whose integrity depends on your not readily associating it with anything else."

Comparative Literature

“The Bond of the Furthest Apart is a powerful description of the ethical dimension of aesthetic experience and is in conversation with some of the best work in continental philosophy. It will have a broad appeal across film studies, literary studies, and philosophy.”

Brian Price, University of Toronto

“Original to the point of uniqueness, this is a work of literary and film criticism, but its arguments and insights are fundamentally philosophical. Beneath the vast differences, both within the work of the artists Cameron is so closely studying and between the visions of each of the artists, is a kind of nonconformist unity, a resistance to whatever teaches us to look away, to hide among abstractions, not to see what we are seeing.”

Michael Wood, Princeton University

"Cameron comes to Bresson via Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and her readings of those Russian authors, and of Kafka, in many ways form the backbone of her book, showing the probing, often microscopic, and philosophically inflected adroitness for which her works of criticism have been so frequently lauded....[She] also brings herself as critic to pose radical questions about ethical relations and ultimately to instantiate, splendidly, an ethics."

David Wells | Raritan