Authorship and Authority in Kierkegaard's Writings

Joseph Westfall

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781350163812
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350055971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism

Authorship is a complicated subject in Kierkegaard's work, which he surely recognized, given his late attempts to explain himself in On My Work as an Author. From the use of multiple pseudonyms and antonyms, to contributions across a spectrum of media and genres, issues of authorship abound.

Why did Kierkegaard write in the ways he did? Before we assess Kierkegaard's famous thoughts on faith or love, or the relationship between 'the aesthetic,' 'the ethical,' and 'the religious,' we must approach how he expressed them. Given the multi-authored nature of his works, can we find a view or voice that is definitively Kierkegaard's own? Can entries in his unpublished journals and notebooks tell us what Kierkegaard himself thought? How should contemporary readers understand inconsistencies or contradictions between differently named authors?

We cannot make definitive claims about Kierkegaard's work as a thinker without understanding Kierkegaard's work as an author. This collection, by leading contemporary Kierkegaard scholars, is the first to systematically examine the divisive question and practice of authorship in Kierkegaard from philosophical, literary and theological perspectives.

INDEX

abandonment, here, here, here–here, here

Abraham (Biblical patriarch), here, here, here, here, here, here

absence/absentee, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

absurdity, here, here, here, here, here, here

accountability, here

acting/actor/actress, here–here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here, here

action, here–here, here, here–here, here, here, herehere, here, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here

Adam (Biblical first man), here–here, here–here, here, here–here, here

Adorno, Theodor, here

aesthetics, here, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here

Agacinski, Sylviane, here, here, here, here

Alexander III of Macedon (the Great), here

Alles, Gregory D., here

alterity. See otherness

Alypius of Thagaste (Saint), here

ambiguity, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Amir, Lydia B., here–here, here

Andersen, Hans Christian, here, here, here, here, here–here, here, here–here, here

anonymity, here, here, here, here–here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

anthropology, here

anxi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Citations
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: On Kierkegaard’s Work as an Author
• Kierkegaard qua Author: “Like the Guadalquibir River”
• Rhetoric and Understanding: Authorship as Christian Mission
• Inside the Escritoire: On Kierkegaard’s Erotic Theory of Communication
• Kierkegaard’s Scene Changes: Authorship as Theatrical Practice
• Kierkegaard the Humorist
• A Desire to Be Understood: Authorship and Authority in Kierkegaard’s Work
• Illegible Salvation: The Authority of Language in The Concept of Anxiety
• The Very Tang of Life: Lyrical Jesting in Kierkegaard’s Postscript Title
• “I Came to Carthage”; “So I Arrived in Berlin”: Fleeing, Escape, and Autobiographical Memory in Augustine’s Confessions and Kierkegaard’s Repetition
• Kierkegaard on Andersen and the Art of Storytelling
• On “S.K.”: Deconstructing Signature(s) in Kierkegaard and Sarah Kofman
• Kierkegaard—What “Kind of” Writer? A Dialogue
• Index
• Imprint