Dictations: On Haunted Writing

Ronell, Avital

ISBN 10: 0253317126 / ISBN 13: 9780253317124

Published by Indiana University Press, 1986

About this Item

Hardcover with dustjacket. Pages clean, no notes or highlights. Minor shelf wear. Binding sound. Used - Very Good.

Seller Inventory # 288-a - 00016

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dictations: On Haunted Writing
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication Date: 1986
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253317126
• ISBN 13: 9780253317124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

BRAND NEW

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.