The Philosophical Reflection Of Man In Literature

The first comparative work to explore how humankind seek out the meaning of life amid suffering and struggle.

In this provocative new examination of the philosophical, moral and religious significance of literature, Michael Weston explores the role of literature in both analytic and continental traditions. He initiates a dialogue between them and investigates the growing importance of these issues for major contemporary thinkers. Each chapter explores a philosopher or literary figure who has written on the relation between literature and the good life, such as Derrida, Kierkegaard, Murdoch and Blanchot. Challenging and insightful, Philosophy, Literature and the Human Good is ideal for all students of philosophy and literature.

In the wake of so many other keys to the treasure, whoever undertakes still another book of criticism on the novels and drama of Samuel Beckett must assume the grave burden of justifying the attempt, especially for him who like one of John Barth's recent fictional characterizations of himself, believes that the key to the treasure is the treasure itself. No one will ever have the privilege of the last word on these texts, since any words other than the author's own found therein must be referred back to the text themselves for cautious verification. Indeed, the words the author has used to create the oeuvre stand by virtue of their own creativeness, or fail in their pretense, and need no critical comment to be appreciated for what they have achieved or have failed to achieve. In criticism there is no privileged point of view - not even the author's own. He has consulted his knowledge and experience to make the work, and whoever would criticize his efforts would seem to owe him the indulgence of doing the same. If communication is mediated through the works, the author and his readers respond in recipro cal fashion to the expressiveness of their contexts. For the philosopher of art, the challenge is extremely tempting - on a manifold count.

Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.