Bloomsbury Möbian Nights: Reading Literature and Darkness: 6 (Violence, Desire, and the Sacred)

I died at Auschwitz, French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, and nobody knows it. Möbian Nights: Literary Reading in a Time of Crisis develops a new understanding of literary reading: that in the wake of disasters like the Holocaust, death remains a premise of our experience rather than a future. Challenging customary aesthetic assumptions that we write in order not to die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we write to die. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett), Möbian Nights proposes that all literature works autobiographically, which is to say, in the wake of disaster; with the credo I died; therefore, I am; and for which the language of topology (for example, the Möbius strip) offers a vocabulary for naming the deep structure of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics. Review Möbian Nights presents a sensitive and novel reading of the Möbian as a theoretical and structural frame of interpreting literature. Here the Möbian, not unlike chiastic structures of language and thought, speaks to the interconnected relationship between past and present, difference and continuity, self and other, silence and bearing witness. Through a variety of challenging perspectives, this deeply engaging book gets at the heart of what it means to tell a story. Set against a post-Holocaust landscape and the legacy of night, Goodhart reflects upon a cautionary and discerning way of approaching the world in which we live. --Martha J. Reineke, Professor of Religion, University of Northern Iowa, USAIn this extraordinarily rich and thought-provoking follow-up to his earlier Sacrificing Commentary, Sandor Goodhart offers us a new, 'Möbian' basis for a general theory of the literary, which encompasses an impressively wide range of texts and authors, from Homeric epic to Derridean deconstruction. The intellectual tour de force does not for a moment, however, lose sight of the real historical crisis of our time; for over it all hovers the shadow of Auschwitz. Möbian Nights will prove necessary reading for anyone seriously interested in literature and literary criticism, and their relation to each other, as well as to philosophy, Biblical religion, and ethics. --Victoria Aarons, O.R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of English, Trinity University, USA About the Author Sandor Goodhart is Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University, USA. He is the author of editor of five books, including The Prophetic Law. Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical (Michigan State University Press, 2014), Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (co-edited with Ann Astell; Notre Dame University Press, 2011) and For René Girard. Essays in Friendship and Truth (co-edited with Jørgen Jørgenson, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams; Michigan State University Press, 2009).