On the Ethical Imperatives of the Interregnum

Essays in Loving Strife from Soren Kierkegaard to Cornel West
Softcover Nachdruck of the original 1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-3-319-83846-5
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 140 Seiten, Previously published in hardcover, Format (B × H): 148 mm x 210 mm, Gewicht: 216 g

Reihe: Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination

This book is an autobiographical meditation on the way in which the world’s population has been transformed into a society of refugees and émigrés seeking –indeed, demanding– an alternative way of political belonging. Focusing on the interregnum we have precariously occupied since the end of World War II—and especially after 9/11— it constitutes a series of genealogical chapters that trace the author’s journey from his experience as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany to the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden in February 1945. In doing so, it explores his search for an intellectual vocation adequate to the dislocating epiphany he experienced in bearing witness to these traumatising events. Having subsequently lost faith in the logic of belonging perpetuated by the nation-state, Spanos charts how he began to look in the rubble of that zero zone for an alternative way of belonging: one in which the old binary —whose imperative was based on the violence of the Friend/enemy opposition— was replaced by a paradoxical loving strife that enriched rather than negated the potential of each side. The chapters in this book trace this errant vocational itinerary, from the author’s early undergraduate engagement with Kierkegaard and Heidegger to Cornel West, moving from that disclosive occasion in the zero zone to this present moment.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Spanos, William V.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1:  Retrieving Kierkegaard for the Post-9/11 Occasion:  A Late Meditation on the Secular

Chapter 2:  Heidegger and Das Nichts:  An Autobiographical Meditation on the Question of the Nothing

Chapter 3:  The Enigma of T. S. Eliot:  An Autobiographical Essay on the  Contradictions between His Poetry and Prose

Chapter 4:  On the Place ofExcrement:  My Relation to the Poetry of William Butler Yeats

Chapter 5:  Hannah Arendt, Non-Jewish Jew:  Our Contemporary

Chapter 6:  Edward W. Said and William V. Spanos:  A Contrapuntal     Affiliation

Chapter 7:  Robert Kroetsch, Play, and the Specter:  A Meditation on a   Friendship

Chapter 8:  A “Mad Generosity:  Retrieving John Gardner

Chapter 9:  Robert Creeley,  Quintessential American Poet:  A Dialogue with a Departed Friend

Chapter 10:  Cornel West:  My Black-American Brother

Index

Über Autor(innen)

William V. Spanos is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Binghamton University (State University of New York), USA, and the founding editor of boundary 2:a journal of postmodern literature and culture which he edited from 1970-1987. He is the author of over hundred essays and many books on subject ranging from modernist and postmodernist literature, poststructuralist theory, and New Americanist studies.