"I died at Auschwitz," French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, "and nobody knows it."Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darknessdevelops 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 ordernotto die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we writetodie. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett),Möbian Nightsproposes 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 "Möbius strip") offers a vocabulary for naming the "deep structure" of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics.
Author(s): Sandor Goodhart
Series: Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2017
Language: English
Pages: 352
City: London
FC
Half title
Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction: Möbian 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 Testimony
of Trauma
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, Blanchot, Levinas, and Genesis 1
6 “All the story of the night”: Criticism, Literature, and the Möbian
7 “I died in Auschwitz”: Literary Reading, the Möbian, and the Posthumous
Conclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and Darkness
Works Cited
Index
