Overview

Breaking with linearity – the ruling narrative model in the Jewish-Christian tradition since the ancient world – many 20th-century European writers adopted circular narrative forms. Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez shows this trend was not a unified nor conscious movement, but rather a series of works arising sporadically in different countries at different times, using a variety of circular structures to express similar concerns and ideas about the world. This study also shows how the renewed understanding of narrative form leading to this circular trend was anticipated by Nietzsche’s critiques of truth, knowledge, language and metaphysics, and especially by his related discussions of nihilism and the eternal recurrence. Starting with an analysis of the theory and genealogy of linear narrative, the author charts the emergence of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return, before then turning to the history of the circular narrative trend. This history is explored from its inception, in the works of August Strindberg, Gertrude Stein and Azorín; through its development in the interwar years, by writers such as Raymond Queneau and Vladimir Nabokov; to its full flowering in the work of authors James Joyce or Samuel Beckett, among others; and its later employment by post-war writers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Italo Calvino and Maurice Blanchot. Through a series of close readings, the book aims to highlight the various ways in which narrative circularity serves to break with an essentially teleological and theological thinking. Finally, Toribio Vazquez concludes by proposing a new typology of non-linear narratives, which builds on the work of recent narratologists.

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9781501384912

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In this groundbreaking work, Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez retraces the teleological view of literature through a wide expanse of texts, both narrative and of literary criticism - from Homer to Aristotle, Tasso and Schiller - before delineating how certain authors of modern literature rejected linearity in favour of circular forms of narrative. Built on Nietzschean philosophy, particularly on his idea of eternal recurrence, the book's close engagement with writers and dramatists, ranging from Strindberg to Nabokov, Joyce, Borges and Calvino, radically reconfigures the aesthetics grounding these texts. This brilliant account adds an important dimension to the evolution of the Western narrative. --Thirthankar Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India, and co-editor of Samuel Beckett as World Litertature Far from a mere typology, Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature is both ambitious in scope and quite original in dealing with its central premise. Toribio Vazquez offers a personal attempt to present and understand the many different circular alternatives probed by the 20th-century writers under the spell of Nietzsche's negative philosophy, a milestone for the contemporary collapse of linearity. His close readings compose an engaging picture of modernism(s) in Europe, sensitive to singularities and also particularly attentive of non-canonical names, such as Azorin and Kharns. A fine, comprehensive study, theory and analysis concerned. --Fabio de Souza Andrade, Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil In this wide-ranging comparative study Toribio Vazquez extends our understanding of post-Nietzschean poetics. His corpus of canonical and non-canonical 20th-century writers exploit structures of circularity for a variety of purposes, from the axiological and psychological to the existential and self-referential. This is an ambitious and impressive piece of work. --Duncan Large, Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia, UK

In this groundbreaking work, Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez retraces the teleological view of literature through a wide expanse of texts, both narrative and of literary criticism – from Homer to Aristotle, Tasso and Schiller – before delineating how certain authors of modern literature rejected linearity in favour of circular forms of narrative. Built on Nietzschean philosophy, particularly on his idea of eternal recurrence, the book’s close engagement with writers and dramatists, ranging from Strindberg to Nabokov, Joyce, Borges and Calvino, radically reconfigures the aesthetics grounding these texts. This brilliant account adds an important dimension to the evolution of the Western narrative. * Thirthankar Chakraborty, Assistant Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology Bhilai, India, and co-editor of Samuel Beckett as World Litertature * Far from a mere typology, Circular Narratives in Modern European Literature is both ambitious in scope and quite original in dealing with its central premise. Toribio Vazquez offers a personal attempt to present and understand the many different circular alternatives probed by the 20th-century writers under the spell of Nietzsche’s negative philosophy, a milestone for the contemporary collapse of linearity. His close readings compose an engaging picture of modernism(s) in Europe, sensitive to singularities and also particularly attentive of non-canonical names, such as Azorín and Kharns. A fine, comprehensive study, theory and analysis concerned. * Fábio de Souza Andrade, Professor of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo, Brazil * In this wide-ranging comparative study Toribio Vazquez extends our understanding of post-Nietzschean poetics. His corpus of canonical and non-canonical 20th-century writers exploit structures of circularity for a variety of purposes, from the axiological and psychological to the existential and self-referential. This is an ambitious and impressive piece of work. * Duncan Large, Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia, UK *

Author Information

Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez is Lecturer in Spanish and Literature at Sam Sharpe Teacher’s College, Montego Bay, Jamaica. He is co-editor, with Thirthankar Chakraborty, of Samuel Beckett as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020)

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