
Illness as Method
Beckett, Kafka, Mann, Woolf and Eliot
Jayjit Sarkar(Author)
Vernon Press
Published on 19. July 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
118 pages
978-1-62273-805-2 (ISBN)
Description
This work questions the problematic connections between illness and modernity: the complicated negotiations involving the body both in its physicality and phenomenology and the poetics and praxiality of illness. The project, which is predominantly conceptual in nature, for it does not see illness solely as a clinical-physical category (leaning heavily on the medical sciences), but rather perspectivizes its phenomenology and pathographical limits and manifestations, lateralizing on its critical correspondences with a selection of modernist texts ranging from Virginia Woolf to Samuel Beckett.
The book unearths different ‘possibilities’ of illness without denying its (quite natural) association with morbidity, pain, suffering, dying and death. It looks at illness and its effects on different bodies phenomenologically with the help of some twentieth-century philosophers, including Martin Heidegger, Jean Luc-Nancy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Levinas. The book locates these phenomenological understandings in a reading of some of the important literary works of early twentieth-century Europe — five literary works from five different genres (poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction and epistle) — critiquing the relevance of the phenomenological body in the literary and narrative world of the texts. The author deals with Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Franz Kafka’s letters, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland within the aesthetico-philosophical space and the epistemic dialogism that modernist aesthetics implies and espouses.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Delaware
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 7 mm
Weight
184 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62273-805-2 (9781622738052)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Jayjit Sarkar is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Raiganj University, India. He is the author of Illness as Method: Beckett, Kafka, Mann, Woolf and Eliot (Vernon Press, 2019), and the co-editor of Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics, Precariousness, (ibidem Press, 2020), Geographia Literaria: Studies in Earth, Ethics and Literature (ibidem Press, forthcoming, 2021) and The Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming, 2021).