Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context

by Jonathan Judaken (Editor), Robert Bernasconi (Editor)

Overview

This anthology provides a history of the systemization and canonization of existentialism, a quintessentially antisystemic mode of thought. Situating existentialism within the history of ideas, it features new readings on the most influential works in the existential canon, exploring their formative contexts and the cultural dialogues of which they were a part.

Emphasizing the multidisciplinary and global nature of existential arguments, the chosen texts relate to philosophy, religion, literature, theater, and culture and reflect European, Russian, Latin American, African, and American strains of thought. Readings are grouped into three thematic categories: national contexts, existentialism and religion, and transcultural migrations that explore the reception of existentialism. The volume explains how literary giants such as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were incorporated into the existentialist fold and how inclusion into the canon recast the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and it describes the roles played by Jaspers and Heidegger in Germany and the Paris School of existentialism in France. Essays address not only frequently assigned works but also underappreciated discoveries, underscoring their vital relevance to contemporary critical debate. Designed to speak to a new generation's concerns, the collection deploys a diverse range of voices to interrogate the fundamental questions of the human condition.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231519670
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/05/2012
Series:	NONE
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jonathan Judaken is Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual and the editor of Race After Sartre: Anti-racism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism and Naming Race, Naming Racisms.

Robert Bernasconi is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University and the author of two books on Heidegger. His most recent publication is How to Read Sartre. He has edited or coedited numerous collections on Levinas, including The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, and on the critical philosophy of race, including Race.

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Jonathan Judaken
Part I: (Trans)National Contexts
1. Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism, by Val Vinokur
2. German Existentialism and the Persistence of Metaphysics: Weber, Jaspers, Heidegger, by Peter E. Gordon
3. Sisyphus's Progeny: Existentialism in France, by Jonathan Judaken
4. "To Punch Through 'Pasteboard Masks'?": American Existentialism, by George Cotkin
5. Angst Across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain, by Martin Woessner
6. Existentialisms in the Hispanic and Latin American Worlds: El Quixote and its Existential Children
Part II: Existentialism and Religion
7. Fear and Trembling and the Paradox of Christian Existentialism, by George Pattison
8. Jewish Co-Existentialism: Being with the Other, by Paul Mendes-Flohr
9. Camus the Unbeliever: Living Without God, by Ronald Aronson
Part III: Migrations
10. Anxiety and Secularization: Soren Kierkegaard and the Twentieth-Century Invention of Existentialism, by Samuel Moyn
11. Rethinking the 'Existential' Nietzsche in German: Lowith, Jaspers, Heidegger, by Charles Bambach Charles Bambach
12. Situating Frantz Fanon's Account of Black Experience, by Robert Bernasconi
13. Simone de Beauvoir in her Times and Ours: The Second Sex and its Legacy in French Feminist Thought, by Debra Bergoffen
14. The "Letter on Humanism": Reading Heidegger in France, by Ethan Kleinberg
List of Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

Martin Jay

If existentialism had any one overriding aim, it was to convince us that we can transcend our contexts, defy convention, and rebel against historical destiny. And yet with the passage of time, it has seemed more and more itself an expression of a specific moment and milieu, which are no longer our own. These learned and insightful essays provide ample evidence of the parallax vision needed to situate it in its multiple temporal and spatial contexts, while allowing us to believe it may still have enduring meaning beyond them all.

— Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, U. of California, Berkeley

Editorial Reviews

The essays are uniformly of high quality...highly recommended.

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