Overview
“I died at Auschwitz,” French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, “and nobody knows it.” Möbian 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), Möbian 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 “Möbius strip”) offers a vocabulary for naming the “deep structure” of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics.
Full Product Details
Author: Professor Sandor Goodhart (Purdue University, USA)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic USA
Weight: 0.635kg
ISBN: 9781501326936
ISBN 10: 1501326937
Pages: 352
Publication Date: 24 August 2017
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand 
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Table of 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 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 Möbian 7. Literarary Reading, the Möbian, and the Posthumous Conclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and Darkness Bibliography Index
Reviews
In this beautifully written and strikingly original contribution to post-Holocaust literature, Sandor Goodhart locates in the Mobian structure first described by 19th-century mathematician August Ferdinand Mobius a model for difference or otherness that, in fact, attests to continuity and sameness. Tracing in Mobian fashion an autobiographical line extending from Homer to Beckett, Goodhart shows that we never stand outside the drama the literary presents to us. Suggesting that Mobian logic is endemic to all literary critical discourse, Goodhart, at once an astute philosopher and consummate Jewish storyteller, attests to the 'doubling back of language on itself' in a dark night that makes all writing 'the story of my death.' Martha J. Reineke, Professor of Religion, University of Northern Iowa, USA
Author Information
Sandor Goodhart is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University, USA. He is the author of editor of five books, including The Prophetic Law. Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (2014), Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (co-edited with Ann Astell, 2011) and For René Girard. Essays in Friendship and Truth (co-edited with Jørgen Jørgenson, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams, 2009).
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