"I died at Auschwitz," French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, "and nobody knows it." Mö bian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness develops a new understanding of literary reading: that in the wake of disasters like the Holocaust, death remains a premise of our experience rather than a future.
Challenging customary "aesthetic" assumptions that we write in order not to die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we write to die. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett), Mö bian Nights proposes that all literature works "autobiographically", which is to say, in the wake of disaster; with the credo "I died; therefore, I am"; and for which the language of topology (for example, the "Mö bius strip") offers a vocabulary for naming the "deep structure" of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mö bian Turns: Difference as Continuity
1. After The Tragic Vision: Krieger and Criticism, Lentricchia and Crisis
2. Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration
3. Witnessing the Impossible: Laub, Felman, and the Trauma of Testimony
4. Documenting Fiction: Kolitz, van Beeck, Levinas, and Holocaust Witness
5. "And Darkness Upon the Face of the Deep": Counter-Redemptive Hermeneutics in Wiesel, Mauriac, Cayrol, Blanchot, Levinas, and Genesis 1
6. Criticism, Literature, and the Mö bian
7. Literarary Reading, the Mö bian, and the Posthumous
Conclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and Darkness
Bibliography
Index
