Authors: Philip Beitchman
ISBN-13: 9780761819905, ISBN-10: 0761819908
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University Press of America
Date Published: April 2001
Edition: ANN
The View from Nowhere is a cross-disciplinary work that studies the impact of the mystical discourse, specifically Cabala, on literature, from the Renaissance to the present. The other major concern of "The View from Nowhere" is to evaluate the "reading" of postmodern simulation-theory, principally that of Jean Baudrillard of Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean existentialism.
Author Biography: Philip Beitchman is author of "Alchemy of the Word, Cabala of the Renaissance" (SUNY press, 1998) and "I am a Process with No Subject, (University of Florida Press, 1988). He is Adjunct Associate Professor at Saint Francis College, NY and Adjunct Assistant Professor at St. Johns University and Medgar Evers College, NY.
In this text, Beitchman (affiliation not cited) aims to establish and explain the impact of the Jewish occult tradition of cabala on literature and vice versa. His analysis of literature includes the writings of John Milton and Nathaniel Hawthorne's . The final chapters discuss contemporary theorist Jean Baudrillard's "misreadings" (according to Beitchman) of Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Foreword/Shoreword | ||
Preface | ||
Acknowledgments | ||
Preamble: Charles Baudelaire's Poeme du haschisch as Prototype for a Cinematic Perception of Reality | 1 | |
Ch. 1 | Milton and Cabala Reconsidered | 9 |
Ch. 2 | Cabala and Literature | 45 |
Interlude: Psychotic Episode as Passage, Inferno and Paradise: Gerard de Nerval's Aurelia as Other World | 79 | |
Ch. 3 | The 'Fatal Strategies' of Soren Kierkegaard | 89 |
Ch. 4 | Transcending Hegel | 107 |
Ch. 5 | What it means to be really Nietzschean: Baudrillard's Philosophy of Simulation and an Ethics of Misreading | 119 |
Epilogue: Enigma, Exigence, Expiation - Hegel, Blanchot, Des Forets | 131 | |
Appendices | 135 | |
Notes | 153 | |
Bibliography I (Chapters One and Two) | 185 | |
Bibliography II (Chapters Three, Four and Five) | 195 | |
Index | 199 |