eBook

The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot and Beckett

Fort, Jeff

2014,2020

Overview

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 itand 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.

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Subject: Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989 -- Criticism and interpretation / Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989 / Blanchot, Maurice / Blanchot, Maurice -- Criticism and interpretation / categorical imperative / Criticism and interpretation / death mask / Ethics & Moral Philosophy / Franz Kafka / Immanuel Kant / Jean-Luc Nancy / Kafka, Franz, 1883-1924 -- Criticism and interpretation / Kafka, Franz, 1883–1924 / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory / Literary Studies / literature and philosophy / Martin Heidegger / Maurice Blanchot / Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe / PHILOSOPHY / Philosophy & Theory / PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy / Samuel Beckett / schematism / Semiotics & Theory / sublime / Sublime, The, in literature / writing
• ISBN: 9780823254699, 0823254690