In arguing that Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical explanation of the possibility of modernism, the author shows that literary fiction can do the work of philosophy.
The first comprehensive interpretation of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra--an important and difficult text and the only book Nietzsche ever wrote with characters, events, setting, and a plot. Laurence Lampert's chapter-by-chapter commentary on Nietzsche's magnum opus clarifies not only Zarathustra's narrative structure but also the development of Nietzsche's thinking as a whole. "An impressive piece of scholarship. Insofar as it solves the riddle of Zarathustra in an unprecedented fashion, this study serves as an invaluable resource for all serious students of Nietzsche's philosophy. Lampert's persuasive and thorough interpretation is bound to spark a revival of interest in Zarathustra and raise the standards of Nietzsche scholarship in general."--Daniel W. Conway, Review of Metaphysics "A book of scholarship, filled with passion and concern for its text."--Tracy B. Strong, Review of Politics "This is the first genuine textual commentary on Zarathustra in English, and therewith a genuine reader's guide. It makes a significant and original contribution to its field."--Werner J. Dannhauser, Cornell University "This is a very valuable and carefully wrought study of a very complex and subtle poetic-philosophical work that provides access to Nietzsche's style of presenting his thought, as well as to his passionately affirmed values. Lampert's commentary and analysis of Zarathustra is so thorough and detailed. . . that it is the most useful English-language companion to Nietzsche's 'edifying' and intriguing work."--Choice Selected as one of Choice's outstanding academic books for 1988
Building on recent transformative theories of influence, John Foster explores the many ways Nietzsche's intellectual and artistic example helped shape an interconnected series of major literary projects from 1900 to the 1940s. He portrays Nietzsche as a stimulating but disturbing force who left a well-defined legacy of concerns that modernists appropriated for their fiction. The author focuses particularly on Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Malraux, and Mann, analyzing their strategies of acceptance, revision, and subversion. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
In Look, a Negro!, political theorist Robert Gooding-Williams imaginatively and impressively unpacks fundamental questions around race and racism. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's famous description of the profound effect of being singled out by a white child with the words Look, a Negro!, his book is an insightful, rich and unusually wide-ranging work of social criticism. These essays engage themes that have dominated debates on race and racial identity in recent years: the workings of racial ideology (including the interplay of gender and sexuality in the articulation of racial ideology), the viability of social constructionist theories of race, the significance of Afrocentrism and multiculturalism for democracy, the place of black identity in the imagination and articulation of America's inheritance of philosophy, and the conceptualization of African-American politics in post-segregation America. Look, a Negro! will be of interest to philosophers, political theorists, critical race theorists, students of cultural studies and film, and readers concerned with the continuing importance of race-consciousness to democratic culture in the United States.
Reconfiguring Nietzsche’s seminal impact on modernist literature and culture, this book presents a distinctive new reading of modernism by exploring his sustained philosophical engagement with nihilism and its inextricable tie to pain and sickness. Arguing that modernist texts dramatize the frailty of the ill, the impotent, and the traumatised modern subject unable to render suffering significant through traditional religious means, it uses the Nietzschean diagnoses of nihilism and what he calls 'ressentiment', the entwined feelings of powerlessness and vindictiveness, as heuristic tools to remap the fictional landscapes of Lawrence, Kafka, and Beckett. Lucid, authoritative and accessible, this book will appeal internationally to literature and philosophy scholars and undergraduates as well as to readers in medical and sociological fields.
Anglo-American modernist writing and modern mass democratic states emerged at the same time, during the period of 1900-1930. Yet writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Ford Madox Ford were notoriously hostile to modern democracies. They often defended, in contrast, anti-democratic forms of cultural authority. Since the late 1970s, however, our understanding of modernist culture has altered as previously marginalised writers, in particular women such as Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Mina Loy, have been reassessed. Not only has the picture of Anglo-American modernist culture changed significantly, but the understanding of the relationship between modernist writing and politics has also shifted. Rachel Potter here reassess the relationship between modernism and democracy by analysing the wide range of different reactions by modernist writers to the new democracies. She charts the changes in the ideas of democracy as a result of the shift from liberal to mass democracies after the First World War and of women's entrance into the political and cultural spheres. By uncovering hitherto-unanalysed essays by a number of feminist writers she argues that in fact there was a widespread scepticism about the consequences of mass democracy for women's liberation, and that this scepticism was central to the work of women modernist writers.
The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is an engaging introduction to this rich and provocative philosophical text. Nietzsche is arguably one of the most influential and yet least understood philosophers of the nineteenth century. The same can be said of his self-proclaimed magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work has influenced everything from poetry, literature, and music to philosophy, psychoanalysis, and soldiers on the battlefields of World War I. Its contents, however, are still far from being understood. On the one hand, the principal aims and even the genre of Zarathustra remain unclear. On the other hand, the work expresses, in poetic fashion, some of Nietzsche’s most important, controversial, and enigmatic doctrines: the Üebermensch, the eternal recurrence of the same, and the will to power. The Routledge Guidebook to Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century philosophy, German philosophy, and intellectual history and suitable for anyone studying Nietzsche’s most famous text for the first time.
This book explores the political-theological implications of sacramental desire in Fyodor Dostoevsky`s The Brothers Karamazov with Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra in critical dialogue with Henri de Lubac. Suderman demonstrates how the work of de Lubac, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche address a transcendent desire for a higher social and political unity in late-modern Western cultures and the imperialistic and coercive tendencies latent within it, concretely expressed in the Western church and the modern state. Specifically, this book investigates how Dostoevsky and Nietzsche envision new forms of political embodiment that are neither escapist nor imperialist. Through a detailed examination of Zarathustra’s dramatic discovery of the eternal return and Alyosha’s mystical experience of the resurrection, Suderman demonstrates the metaphysical significance of their respective political ethics. While the intent of de Lubac is to recover the social implications of the sacraments of Roman Catholicism, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky espouse alternative articulations of community and the sacramental desire necessary for such embodiment, a desire rooted in their respective perceptions of God.
Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most widely read authors in the world, from the time of his death to the present—as well as one of the most controversial. He has been celebrated as a theorist of individual creativity and self-care but also condemned as an advocate of antimodern politics and hierarchical communalism. Rather than treating these approaches as mutually exclusive, Jeremy Fortier contends that we ought instead to understand Nietzsche’s complex legacy as the consequence of a self-conscious and artful tension woven into the fabric of his books. The Challenge of Nietzsche uses Nietzsche as a guide to Nietzsche, highlighting the fact that Nietzsche equipped his writings with retrospective self-commentaries and an autobiographical apparatus that clarify how he understood his development as an author, thinker, and human being. Fortier shows that Nietzsche used his writings to establish two major character types, the Free Spirit and Zarathustra, who represent two different approaches to the conduct and understanding of life: one that strives to be as independent and critical of the world as possible, and one that engages with, cares for, and aims to change the world. Nietzsche developed these characters at different moments of his life, in order to confront from contrasting perspectives such elemental experiences as the drive to independence, the feeling of love, and the assessment of one’s overall health or well-being. Understanding the tension between the Free Spirit and Zarathustra takes readers to the heart of what Nietzsche identified as the tensions central to his life, and to all human life.
We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche’s thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche’s powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places. Shapiro explores Nietzsche’s rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche’s prescient vision of today’s massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state’s desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche’s vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the Antichrist,” by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck’s Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche’s Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history.