Description
Book SynopsisSubjectivity and Nationhood in Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett: Nietzschean Constellations reconceptualises Friedrich Nietzsche’s position in the intellectual history of modernism and substantively refigures our received ideas regarding his relationship to these Irish modernists. Building on recent developments in new modernist studies, the book demonstrates that Nietzsche is a modernist writer
and a modernist philosopher by drawing new parallels between his engagement with established philosophical theories and the aesthetic practices that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot identified as quintessentially modernist. With specific reference to key Nietzschean philosophemes – eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, transnationalism, cultural paralysis, and ethical perspectivism –
it
challenges the longstanding assumption that Yeats, who repeatedly acknowledged his admiration for Nietzsche, is the most 'Nietzschean' of these Irish modernists. While showing how both Joyce and Beckett are in many important ways more 'Nietzschean' than Yeats, this interdisciplinary study makes a number of significant and timely contributions to the fields of Irish studies and modernist studies.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Nietzschean Modernism1. Foundational Systems and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same2. Aesthetic Potentiality and the Übermensch Ideal3. Cultural Paralysis and the Transnational State of Being4. Consciousness and the Ethics of AlterityConclusion: Nietzschean Constellations
