Nietzsche and Modernism

Description

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 denuded of the traditional means to justify or redeem one’s suffering, 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. Front Matter ....Pages i-xi Introduction: Nietzsche, Nihilism and Modernism (Stewart Smith)....Pages 1-21 Friedrich Nietzsche, Nihilism and Meaningless Suffering (Stewart Smith)....Pages 23-68 D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Erotic Transcendence of Nihilism (Stewart Smith)....Pages 69-116 Franz Kafka’s The Trial and the Interpretation of Suffering (Stewart Smith)....Pages 117-160 Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and the Economy of Ressentiment (Stewart Smith)....Pages 161-206 Conclusion: Affective Modernism (Stewart Smith)....Pages 207-217 Back Matter ....Pages 219-236