Imperative to Write

Imperative to Write

Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett

  • Autor: Fort, Jeff
  • Editor: Fordham University Press
  • ISBN: 9780823254699
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780823254712
  • eISBN Epub: 9780823254705
  • Lugar de publicación:  New York , Estados Unidos
  • Año de publicación: 2014
  • Año de publicación digital: 2014
  • Mes: Marzo
  • Idioma: Ingles

Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer’s vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from it—and that leave it in ruins?

This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture. If Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett mimic a sublime vocation in their extreme devotion to writing, they do so in full awareness that the trajectory it dictates leads not to metaphysical redemption but rather downward, into the uncanny element of fiction. As this book argues, the sublime has always been a deeply melancholy affair, even in its classical Kantian form, but it is in the attenuated speech of narrative voices progressively stripped of their resources and rewards that the true nature of this melancholy is revealed.

  • Cover
  • Contents
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Preface
  • INTRODUCTION: “Why Do You Write?”—The Fault of Writing
  • PART ONE: KAFKA
    • 1. Kafka’s Teeth: The Literary Gewissenbiss
    • 2. The Ecstasy of Judgment
    • 3. Embodied Violence and the Leap from the Law: “In the Penal Colony” and The Trial
    • 4. Degradation of the Sublime: “A Hunger Artist”
  • PART TWO: BLANCHOT
    • 5. Pointed Instants: Blanchot’s Exigencies
    • 6. The Shell and the Mask: L’arrêt de mort
    • 7. The Dead Look: The Death Mask, the Corpse Image, and the Haunting of Fiction
  • PART THREE: BECKETT
    • 8. Beckett’s Voices and the Paradox of Expression
    • 9. Company, But Not Enough
  • Conclusion: Speech Unredeemed: From the Call of Conscience to the Torture of Language
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
    • A
    • B
    • C
    • D
    • E
    • F
    • G
    • H
    • I
    • J
    • K
    • L
    • M
    • N
    • O
    • P
    • R
    • S
    • T
    • U
    • V
    • W
    • Z

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