John Banville and His Precursors

Description

Bringing together leading international scholars, John Banville and His Precursors explores Booker and Franz Kafka prize-winning Irish author John Banville’s most significant intellectual influences. The book explores how Banville’s novels engage deeply with a wide range of sources, from literary figures such as Samuel Beckett, Heinrich von Kleist, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Henry James, to thinkers such as Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot. Reading the full range of Banville’s writings - from his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea to his latest book, Mrs Osmond – John Banville and His Precursors reveals the richness of the author’s work. In this way, the book also raises questions about the contemporary moment’s relationship to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions -– Romanticism, Modernism, existentialism -– and how the significance of these can be appreciated in new and often surprising ways Title Page Copyright Page Contents Contributors Foreword References Acknowledgements Introduction Who talks through whom? ‘The ecstasy of influence’ Overview of chapters Notes References Part 1: National and transnational currents Chapter 1: John Banville and the idea of the precursor: Some meditations References Chapter 2: Unknown unity: Ireland and Europe in Beckett and Banville Notes References Part 2: Literary engagements Chapter 3: ‘The vain thing menaced by the touch of the real’: John Banville as a precursor to Henry James References Chapter 4: From Isabel Archer to Mrs Osmond: John Banville reinterprets Henry James Introduction From psychology to representation From modernism to postmodernism From authenticity to artifice From good to evil From being to doing From an ethics of virtue to an ethics of care Conclusion References Chapter 5: Afterlives of a supreme fiction: John Banville’s dialogue with Wallace Stevens Towards a supreme fiction: Abstraction, transcendence, nobility Dimensions of perception in Banville’s Art trilogy Writing from after the end: John Banville’s ‘series writing’ Notes References Chapter 6: Effacing the subject: Banville, Kleist and a world without people From the semiotics of the text to the aesthetics of the event ‘Who, if not I?’: The death of the other Nonhuman becomings References Chapter 7: The limits of simile: Rilke, Stevens and Banville’s scepticism Doctor Copernicus Notes References Chapter 8: John Banville and Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Language, mundane revelation and profane sacrality Notes References Part 3: Philosophical, theoretical and artistic forebears Chapter 9: A fool’s errand: Blanchot, mourning and The Sea References Chapter 10: Reading Banville with Lacan: Hysteric aesthetics in The Book of Evidence The hysteric subject Discomfort in Symbolic identity Hysteric speech Preponderance of the imaginary: Play The reconstruction of the Symbolic: The hammer Notes References Chapter 11: Existential precursors and contemporaries in Banville’s Alex Cleave trilogy Notes References Chapter 12: An earthly glow’: Heidegger and the uncanny in Eclipse and The Sea ‘At length – how else?’: Banville on Heidegger Banville’s uncanny: The thoughts thus far ‘so emphatically not our medium’: The uncanny in Eclipse, The Sea and elsewhere ‘art … makes things strange’ Notes References Chapter 13: John Banville’s ekphrastic experiments Notes References Index