Möbian Nights

Reading Literature and Darkness

Sandor Goodhart

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781501350818
• eBook ISBN: 9781501326943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory

"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.

Table of contents

• Violence, Desire, and the Sacred
• Dedication
• Title
• 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
• Copyright