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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett

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

Fort, Jeff

Hardcover

PhilosophyLiterary Criticism

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0823254690
ISBN13: 9780823254699
Publisher: Fordham Univ Pr
Published: Mar 3 2014
Pages: 440
Weight: 1.65
Height: 1.60 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.20
Language: English

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.

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