Featuring the latest research findings and exploring the fascinating interplay of modernist authors and intellectual luminaries, from Beckett and Kafka to Derrida and Adorno, this bold new collection of essays gives students a deeper grasp of key texts in modernist literature.
Jean-Michel Rabaté uses Nietzsche's image of a “pathos of distance,” the notion that values are created by a few gifted and lofty individuals, as the basis for a wide-ranging investigation into the ethics of the moderns. Revealing overlooked connections between Nietzsche's and Benjamin's ideas of history and ethics, Rabaté provides an original genealogy for modernist thought, moving through figures and moments as varied as Yeats and the birth of Irish Modernism, the ethics of courage in Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Apollinaire, and others in 1910, T. S. Eliot's post-war despair, Jean Cocteau's formidable selfmythology in his first film The Blood of a Poet, Siri Hustvedt's novel of American trauma, and J. M. Coetzee's dystopia portraying an affectless future haunted by a messianic promise.
Jean-Michel Rabate examines why Freud felt that literature was essential in the training of psychoanalysts and how literature provided crucial terms for his theories, such as the Oedipus complex. Literary examples range from Cervantes and Shakespeare to more recent authors like Sophie Calle and Yann Martel.
Exploring Samuel Beckett's choice to write in French, this book delves into the interplay of form and genre in his work, highlighting a paradoxical ethics of failure and humility that challenges modernism. It examines the insights of thinkers like Bataille, Adorno, and Badiou, emphasizing Beckett's refusal to pander to audiences while providing a reason to endure amidst despair. His innovative approach, marked by an anti-humanist vision and the theme of the animal, underscores his brilliance and relevance, particularly in his declaration of inhuman rights.
Introduction 1. How to Live with Global Rust 2. Hegel and Ruskin, from the Inorganic to the Organic 3. Interlude: Blood-work 4. Rats and Jackals, Kafka after von Hofmannsthal 5. Aesthetics of Rust Conclusion: Fougères to Marseilles: Green Rust or Edible Rouille? Acknowledgments Notes Index