The Unknown Distance : From Consciousness to Conscience, Goethe to Camus / Edward Engelberg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Engelberg, Edward, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bewusstsein.

Conscience (Morale) dans la littérature.

Conscience dans la littérature.

Conscience.

Consciousness.

Gewissen (Motiv).

Gewissen.

Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft.

Literatur.

Self-knowledge in literature.

LITERARY CRITICISM / General.

Local Subjects:

Conscience.

Consciousness.

LITERARY CRITICISM / General.

Self-knowledge in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (306 p.)

Edition:

Reprint 2014

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2014]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Edward Engelberg argues that Conscience and Consciousness have slowly drifted apart from their once nearly identical meanings: inward knowledge of oneself. This process of separation, he shows, reached a critical point in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the age of "dualisms." Tracing the evolution of the severance of Conscience from Consciousness, he demonstrates from a wide range of examples in literature and philosophy how such a division shaped the attitudes of important writers and thinkers. The study opens with the Romantics and closes with Kafka, Hesse, and Camus. It includes analyses of Hegel, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, and Freud and brings together for comparison such pairings as Poe and Mann, Goethe and Wordsworth, Arnold and Nietzsche. Engelberg concludes that the cleavage of Conscience from Consciousness is untenable. To dispossess Conscience, he asserts, man would also need to dispossess a full awareness, a full Consciousness; and a full Consciousness inevitably leads back to Conscience.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Preface

Acknowledgments

Contents

The unknown distance

Introduction

I. Conscience and Consciousness: Dualism or Unity?

II. The Price of Consciousness: Goethe's Faust and Byron's Manfred

III. The Risks of Consciousness: Goethe's Werther and Wordsworth's the Prelude

IV. Some Versions of Consciousness and Egotism: Hegel, Dostoevsky's underground Man, and Peer Gynt

V. Consciousness and Will: Poe and Mann

VI. The Tyranny of Conscience: Arnold, James, and Conrad's Lord Jim

VII. Towards a Genealogy of the Modern Problem: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud

VIII. A Case of Conscience: Kafka's the Trial, Hesse's Steppenwolf, and Camus's the Fall

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-674-33323-3

OCLC:

1013938201