Möbian Nights : reading literature and darkness / Sandor Goodhart.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goodhart, Sandor, author.

Series:

Violence, desire, and the sacred ; v. 6.

Violence, desire, and the sacred ; vol. 6

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Criticism.

Disasters in literature.

Crises in literature.

Death in literature.

Physical Description:

xv, 329 pages ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2017.

Summary:

"Möbian Nights: Literary Reading in a Time of Crisis 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."-- Provided by publisher.

"Utilizing insights drawn from mathematical topology, from French critical theory and literature, and from Holocaust studies, Sandor Goodhart articulates a new understanding of the relation of literary reading to disaster"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Goodhart, Sandor, author. Möbian Nights

ISBN:

9781501326936

1501326937

OCLC:

985966577