Nietzsche and Modernism

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.

Represents the first book to provide a sustained examination of Nietzsche's writings on nihilism to illuminate readings of modernist literature and drama Engages in dialogue with recent literary-philosophical research examining modernism, affect and feeling Contributes to, and complicates, readings of modernism's reactionary politics

Auteur
Stewart Smith is an independent scholar. He obtained his PhD from the University of Southampton in 2016.

Contenu

1. Introduction: Nietzsche, Nihilism and Modernism.- 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nihilism and Meaningless Suffering.- 3. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Erotic Transcendence of Nihilism.- 4. Franz Kafka's The Trial and the Interpretation of Suffering.- 5. Samuel Beckett's Endgame and the Economy of Ressentiment .- 6. Conclusion: Affective Modernism.