Möbian Nights

Reading Literature and Darkness

Professor Sandor Goodhart (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

352 Seiten

2019
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-5081-8 (ISBN)

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“I died at Auschwitz,” French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, “and nobody knows it.” Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness develops a new understanding of literary reading: that in the wake of disasters like the Holocaust, death remains a premise of our experience rather than a future.

Challenging customary “aesthetic” assumptions that we write in order not to die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we write to die. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett), Möbian Nights proposes that all literature works “autobiographically”, which is to say, in the wake of disaster; with the credo “I died; therefore, I am”; and for which the language of topology (for example, the “Möbius strip”) offers a vocabulary for naming the “deep structure” of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics.

Sandor Goodhart is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University, USA. He is the author of editor of five books, including The Prophetic Law. Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (2014), Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (co-edited with Ann Astell, 2011) and For René Girard. Essays in Friendship and Truth (co-edited with Jørgen Jørgenson, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams, 2009).

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Möbian Turns: Difference as Continuity
1. After The Tragic Vision: Krieger and Criticism, Lentricchia and Crisis
2. Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration
3. Witnessing the Impossible: Laub, Felman, and the Trauma of Testimony
4. Documenting Fiction: Kolitz, van Beeck, Levinas, and Holocaust Witness
5. “And Darkness Upon the Face of the Deep”: Counter-Redemptive Hermeneutics in Wiesel, Mauriac, Cayrol, Blanchot, Levinas, and Genesis 1
6. Criticism, Literature, and the Möbian
7. Literarary Reading, the Möbian, and the Posthumous
Conclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and Darkness

Bibliography
Index

Erscheinungsdatum	25.02.2019
Reihe/Serie	Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	467 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Ethik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-5081-1 / 1501350811
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-5081-8 / 9781501350818
Zustand	Neuware