Format:
x, 196 Seiten
ISBN:
9781501307218
Content:
"Explores how 20th-century literature gives narrative form to nothing and why nothing is essential to the creation of being, narrative, and other systems of meaning-making"--
Content:
"The concept of nothing has been an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition, 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, Narrative 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-how our perceptions are conditioned, how we make meaning (or madness) out of the stuff of our existence, how we craft our knowable selves, or how we exist in language"--
Note:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 175-188) and index
,
Machine generated contents note:Chapter Zero: Introduction -- Chapter 1: Theorizing Nothing -- Chapter Two: Nineteenth-Century Prototypes - Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby as Nothings that Write Narrative -- Chapter Three: Cradling the Abyss - Vladimir Nabokov and the Semiotics of Nothing -- Chapter Four: Samuel Beckett - Writing Immanent Nothingness -- Chapter Five: Writing the Void and Voided Writing in the Works of Victor Pelevin -- Conclusion: Nothing as the Transcendental Signified -- Bibliography.
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9781501307232
Additional Edition:
ISBN 9781501307225
Language:
English
Subjects:
American Studies
,
Romance Studies
,
Slavic Studies
Keywords:
Beckett, Samuel 1906-1989
;
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovič 1899-1977
;
Pelevin, Viktor 1962-
;
Nihilismus