The concept of nothing was an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition and essential to the creation or operation of human existence, as Jacques...
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The concept of nothing was an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition and essential to the creation or operation of human existence, as Jacques Derrida demonstrated how all structures are built upon a nothing within the structure, and as mathematicians argued that zero the number that is also not a number allows for the creation of our modern mathematical system, Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature suggests that nothing itself enables the act of narration. Focusing on the lit
FC; Half title; Title; Copyright; Dedication; Contents; Acknowledgments; 0 Introduction: Nothing and the twentieth century; Odysseus: Outis; Khôra: Socrates: Knowing nothing; Much ado about nothing; Narratives of nothing; 1 Theorizing nothing; Zero; Nothing and being: Heidegger and Sartre; Nothing and narrative: Nietzsche, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Kristeva; 2 Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby; Akaky Akakievich; Bartleby; 3 "Working in a Void": Vladimir Nabokov and the semiotics of nothing; Muzhiks working in a void; The otherworld and loss
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Reality as nothing and the aesthetics of failure"Signs and Symbols": Patterning and nothing; 4 Samuel Beckett: Immanence, language, nothing; Nothing happens, more than once; Critical approaches to Beckett and nothing; Aesthetics of lessness; Beckettian immanence; Molloy: Questing immanence; Aesthetics of immanent nothing; 5 Victor Pelevin's void and the post-Soviet condition; Pelevin's postmodernism; Engineering the human soul; Pelevin's divine absurdity: The void; Nihilistic nothing in Generation "P"
Sacred nothing in Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of the WerewolfConclusion: Nothing as the transcendental signified; Bibliography; Index
