Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature

Dr. Meghan Vicks (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

208 Seiten

2017
Bloomsbury Academic USA (Verlag)
978-1-5013-3196-1 (ISBN)

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The concept of nothing was an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition and essential to the creation or operation of human existence, as Jacques Derrida demonstrated how all structures are built upon a nothing within the structure, and as mathematicians argued that zero – the number that is also not a number – allows for the creation of our modern mathematical system, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature suggests that nothing itself enables the act of narration. Focusing on the literary works of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Victor Pelevin, Meghan Vicks traces how and why these writers give narrative form to nothing, demonstrating that nothing is essential to the creation of narrative – that is, how our perceptions are conditioned, how we make meaning (or madness) out of the stuff of our existence, how we craft our knowable selves, and how we exist in language.

Meghan Vicks is an independent scholar in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Acknowledgments

Chapter Zero: Introduction: Nothing and the Twentieth Century

Odysseus : Outis
Khôra : Socrates : Knowing Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing
Narratives of Nothing

Chapter One: Theorizing Nothing

Zero
Nothing and Being: Heidegger and Sartre
Nothing and Narrative: Nietzsche, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Kristeva

Chapter Two: Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby

Akaky Akakievich
Bartleby

Chapter Three: “Working in a Void”: Vladimir Nabokov and the Semiotics of Nothing

Muzhiks Working in a Void
The Otherworld and Loss
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Reality as Nothing and the Aesthetics of Failure
“Signs and Symbols”: Patterning and Nothing

Chapter Four: Samuel Beckett: Immanence, Language, Nothing

Nothing happens, more than once
Critical Approaches to Beckett and Nothing
Aesthetics of Lessness
Beckettian Immanence
Molloy: Questing Immanence
Aesthetics of Immanent Nothing

Chapter Five: Victor Pelevin’s Void and the Post-Soviet Condition

Pelevin’s Postmodernism
Engineering the Human Soul
Pelevin’s Divine Absurdity: The Void
Nihilistic Nothing in Generation “P”
Sacred Nothing in Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Conclusion: Nothing as the Transcendental Signified

Bibliography

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	26.04.2017
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	286 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	1-5013-3196-5 / 1501331965
ISBN-13	978-1-5013-3196-1 / 9781501331961
Zustand	Neuware