1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910458934103321

Autore

Knight Christopher J. <1952->

Titolo

Omissions are not accidents : modern apophaticism from Henry James to Jacques Derrida / / Christopher J. Knight

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Toronto, [Canada] ; ; Buffalo, [New York] ; ; London, [England] : , : University of Toronto Press, , 2010

©2010

ISBN

1-4426-8571-9

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (278 p.)

Disciplina

809/.93384

Soggetti

Literature, Modern - 20th century - History and criticism

Negativity (Philosophy) in literature

Silence in literature

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- I. Preface -- II. Henry James ('The Middle Years') -- III. Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) -- IV. Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons) -- V. Paul Cézanne and Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters on Cézanne) -- VI. Ernest Hemingway (In Our Time) -- VII. Martin Heidegger ('What Is Metaphysics?') -- VIII. T.S. Eliot -- IX. Virginia Woolf -- X. Samuel Beckett (Watt) -- XI. Mark Rothko -- XII. William Gaddis (The Recognitions) -- XIII. Vladimir Nabokov (Speak, Memory) -- XIV. Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialectics) -- XV. Susan Sontag ('The Aesthetics of Silence') -- XVI. Penelope Fitzgerald (The Blue Flower) -- XVII. Krzysztof Kieślowski (The Double Life of Véronique) -- XVIII. Frank Kermode (The Genesis of Secrecy) -- XIX. Jacques Derrida ('How to Avoid Speaking: Denials') -- XX. Epilogue -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in a 1919 letter that his work 'consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part which is the important one.' In Omissions Are Not Accidents, Christopher J. Knight analyzes the widespread apophaticism in texts from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth



century. In theology, apophaticism refers to the idea that what we cannot say about God is more fundamental than what we can; in literature and other works of art, Knight argues, it functions as a way of continuing to speak and write even in the face of the unspeakable.Probing the works of authors and intellectuals from Henry James to Jacques Derrida, Knight suggests that we no longer trust ourselves to speak about experience's most numinous aspect, and explores the consequences of the modern artist's tendency to imagine his or her work as incomplete. Ambitious in the scope of its investigation, Omissions Are Not Accidents lends insight into an important modern phenomenon.