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Full Description
Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer's vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from it—and that leave it in ruins?
This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture. If Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett mimic a sublime vocation in their extreme devotion to writing, they do so in full awareness that the trajectory it dictates leads not to metaphysical redemption but rather downward, into the uncanny element of fiction. As this book argues, the sublime has always been a deeply melancholy affair, even in its classical Kantian form, but it is in the attenuated speech of narrative voices progressively stripped of their resources and rewards that the true nature of this melancholy is revealed.
Contents
List of Abbreviations Introduction: "Why Do You Write?"-The Fault of Writing Part I: Kafka 1. Kafka's Teeth: The Literary Gewissenbiss 2. The Ecstasy of Judgment: Ungrasping Justice 3. Embodied Violence and the Leap from the Law: "In the Penal Colony" and The Trial 4. Degradation of the Sublime: "A Hunger Artist" Part II: Blanchot 5. Pointed Instants: Blanchot's Exigencies 6. The Shell and the Mask: L'arret de mort 7. The Dead Look: The Death Mask, the Corpse Image, and the Haunting of Fiction Part III: Beckett 8. Beckett's Voices and the Paradox of Expression Conclusion: Speech Unredeemed-From the Call of Conscience to the Torture of Language Notes Bibliography Index
