Read more
The book fills a significant gap in modern critical studies. Hitherto, there has been no considered attempt to relate Existentialist thought to contemporary literature - and this is precisely what Dr Dobrez achieves, taking four leading writers and discussing their work in relation to Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. Readers will find this account enlightening in its discussion of Existentialism itself and its application of Existentialist principles in modern literature. Thus this book will be of great value to students of both contemporary literature and modern philosophy.>
List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I The Beckett Irreducible1 Beckett: the Reduction
2 Beckett: the philosophical tradition
3 Beckett and Sartre: the Unnamable and the pour soi
4 Beckett and Heidegger: being-in-the-world and the concept of angst
5 Beckett and Heidegger: Existence, nothingness and Being
II Ionesco and the experience of wonder6 Ionesco: claustrophobia and eurphoria
7 Ionesco and Heidegger: authenticity and the collective
8 Ionesco and Heidegger: authenticity, death and the search for being
III Genet's solitude9 Genet: solitude and the Sartrean Look
10 Genet and Sartre: the murderer and the saint
11 Genet and Sartre: the image and the revolutionary
IV The approach to art12 Beckett: the task of saying nothing
13 Genet and the Mass: sacrament as efficacious sign
14 Ionesco: the free imagination
V Pinter and the problem of verification15 Pinter and phenomenology: the subjective-objective synthesis
16 Pinter: psychological realism and the scientific approach
17 Pinter: the lure of objectivity
Conclusion
Source references
Index
