Dictations: On Haunted Writing - Hardcover

Ronell, Avital

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0253317126 ISBN 13: 9780253317124

Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr, 1986

Synopsis

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About this title

Book Description

Channeling Goethe with one of literary criticism’s most imaginative and inimitable mediums

One of the most influential of Goethe's works is one he didn't write but dictated to a young companion. Four years after his death at the age of eighty-three, the great poet spoke again from beyond the grave in Conversations with Eckermann, Johann Peter Eckermann's account of his time with Goethe in the last years of his life. Proclaimed by Nietzsche to be “the best German book,” Conversations with Eckermann contains Goethe's last thoughts about art, poetry, politics, religion, and a host of other highly invested areas of concern for the fate of German letters and philosophy.

In Dictations, Goethe is seen as the undead core of German literary and theoretical production, the basis of a poignant code of symptoms that Avital Ronell tracks and traces. Eckermann, for Ronell, emerges as the hero of haunted writing, the toxically depleted head of the class of Goethe scholars.

About the Author

Avital Ronell is a professor of German, comparative literature, and English at New York University, where she directs the Research in Trauma & Violence project. She is author of The Test Drive and many other books.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr
• Publication date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253317126
• ISBN 13: 9780253317124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 202