Modernism and Nihilism

Modernism and Nihilism PDF Author: S. Weller
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230231030
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Focusing on a wide range of philosophers and writers, from Nietzsche to Derrida and Flaubert to Borges, this book charts the history of the deployment of the concept of nihilism within the discourses of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and considers the similarities and differences between modernist and postmodernist approaches to nihilism.

Modernism and Nihilism

Modernism and Nihilism PDF Author: S. Weller
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230294626
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
Focusing on a wide range of philosophers and writers, from Nietzsche to Derrida and Flaubert to Borges, this book charts the history of the deployment of the concept of nihilism within the discourses of philosophical and aesthetic modernism and considers the similarities and differences between modernist and postmodernist approaches to nihilism.

Nietzsche and Modernism

Nietzsche and Modernism PDF Author: Stewart Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319755358
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Reconfiguring Nietzsche’s seminal impact on modernist literature and culture, this book presents a distinctive new reading of modernism by exploring his sustained philosophical engagement with nihilism and its inextricable tie to pain and sickness. Arguing that modernist texts dramatize the frailty of the ill, the impotent, and the traumatised modern subject unable to render suffering significant through traditional religious means, it uses the Nietzschean diagnoses of nihilism and what he calls 'ressentiment', the entwined feelings of powerlessness and vindictiveness, as heuristic tools to remap the fictional landscapes of Lawrence, Kafka, and Beckett. Lucid, authoritative and accessible, this book will appeal internationally to literature and philosophy scholars and undergraduates as well as to readers in medical and sociological fields.

Nihilism, Modernism, and Value

Nihilism, Modernism, and Value PDF Author: John Fraser
Publisher: eBookIt.com
ISBN: 1456612913
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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Book Description
Nihilism, Modernism, and Value consists of three jargon-free lectures addressed to the general reader. It explores a variety of ways in which writers responded to the phenomenon of nihilism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, By "nihilism" here is meant a sense, at times paralyzing, of the instability and perhaps groundlessness of all values. The book goes into some of the factors— psychological, sociological, philosophical—involved in that destabilizing. But its principal focus is on reintegration, and it draws freely on real-world experiences to illuminate concepts and strategies. Among the writers whose names figure in it are Conrad, Nietzsche, Beckett, Woolf, Heidegger, Rhys, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Lessing, Stevens, Valéry, and James (William), with particular attention at one point to Kafka and Borges. But no prior knowledge of them is required for following the argument, with its numerous lively quotations. The author himself is advancing heuristically, not just performing an academic exercise. The problems confronted are as relevant still as they were generations ago. A reviewer of John Fraser's first book spoke of "an extremely agile and incessantly active mind which illuminates almost every subject it touches." A reviewer of the second one, both of them published by Cambridge University Press, called it "a brilliant and utterly absorbing work," and said that "There are not many learned books which have the unputdownable quality of a thriller; this is one of them."

Interbellum Literature

Interbellum Literature PDF Author: Cor Hermans
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004341803
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 555

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Book Description
In Interbellum Literature Cor Hermans offers an overview of modernist writing in the interwar years. The ideas embodied in the personalities and works of Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Beckett, Céline and others are captured in a new synthesis.

The End of Modernity

The End of Modernity PDF Author: Gianni Vattimo
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801843174
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Gianni Vattimo reexamines the roots of modernism and postmodernism in Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger. Exploring the links between concepts of nihilism and destiny in nineteenth-century humanism, Vattimo follows these trends in aesthetic and scientific theory from Benjamin to Bloch, Ricoeur, and Kuhn.

The Movement of Nihilism

The Movement of Nihilism PDF Author: Laurence Paul Hemming
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0826438695
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
When Nietzsche announced 'the advent of nihilism' in 1887/88, he argued that he was sketching 'the history of the next two centuries': 'For some time now', he wrote, 'our whole European culture has been moving as toward catastrophe [...]: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that want to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.' Can we gain a ground for reflection upon our own condition? Can we heed Nietzsche's warning? Can we respond to the challenge? In this book, eleven newly commissioned essays from leading scholars offer an attempt to grasp Nietzsche's prescience through Heidegger's critique of it; attempting to think through the philosophical consequences of the last century in reading the signs of our own condition. The book also provides and fascinating and unique discussion of some of the lesser-known texts of the later Heidegger.

A Taste for the Negative

A Taste for the Negative PDF Author: Shane Weller
Publisher: MHRA
ISBN: 1904713084
Category : Nihilism (Philosophy) in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
This study examines the relationship between Samuel Beckett and nihilism.

Nihilism in Postmodernity

Nihilism in Postmodernity PDF Author: Ashley Woodward
Publisher: Davies Group Publishers
ISBN: 9781934542088
Category : Nihilism (Philosophy)
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description


Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity

Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity PDF Author: S. Weller
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230506062
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
In Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity Weller argues through an analysis of the interrelated topics of translation, comedy, and gender that to read Beckett in this way is to miss the strangely 'anethical' nature of his work, as opposed to the notion that the literary event constitutes the affirmation of an alterity.

The Specter of the Absurd

The Specter of the Absurd PDF Author: Donald A. Crosby
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 143840008X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 474

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Book Description
This book is our century's most comprehensive and wise treatment of nihilism in all of its guises, comparing favorably with Rosen, Cavell, and indeed with Spengler. Crosby argues that our culture is genuinely haunted by nihilism expressing itself in the fideism of fundamentalism as well as in the debilitating alienation from all orientation. This results from a one-sided development of Western culture. Unlike most writers on this topic, Crosby acknowledges many sources colluding to frame the culture of nihilism, including "the death of God," the objectification of nature, the meaninglessness of suffering in a mechanical universe, the ephemerality of time in a world where value does not accumulate, the arbitrariness of historicized reason, the reduction of value to will, and the alienation of the Cartesian ego. These sources are reviewed in the first two parts of the book with the result that the phenomenon of nihilism becomes understandable. In its third and fourth parts, Crosby provides a critical analysis of the religious and philosophical forces leading to nihilism by discussing authors from the early modern period through Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Russell, and Derrida. He shows that these forces are skewed and impoverished and should not be allowed to determine our situation. The comprehensive attention to detail and the multi-perspectival interpretation demonstrates as well as asserts the richness of the culture that puts nihilism in its place. Part Five, finally, rephrases the criticism of the sources of nihilism in positive ways. Part Four in particular is a tour de force of philosophical argument. Its richness of nuance, plurality of views examined, and adroitness of critical interpretation provide cumulatively a powerful, non-nihilistic reading of the philosophic tradition. The force of the argument derives from its comprehensive, cumulative character. Crosby distinguishes and relates five areas of nihilism: political, moral, epistemological, cosmic, and existential. Throughout the book, he illustrates and examines these as they are expressed in literature and art, in daily life and practical affairs, and in philosophy. The book is richly erudite in its marshalling of consciousness from so many domains.