Abstract

The project at hand concerns the importance of the work of Soren Kierkegaard for twentieth century thought, tracing the literary developments of the German-speaking "Modernists" through the work of those writers interested in Kierkegaard together with an understanding of Kierkegaard as guided by them. All texts, Kierkegaard insists, are "fragmentary." There exists neither any guaranteed meaning nor any guarantor of meaning. No "author" can ever claim single "authority" over the text; and its meaning is never singularly and systematically universalizable. No text, furthermore, can be restricted to the time and place of its occurrence; it continues to produce effects beyond all intentions. Kierkegaard was not alone in this understanding; nor was he alone in his interest in the particular productivity of an only finite language. This understanding of Kierkegaard will set the stage for the central problems of "Modernism": Who or what speaks if the author alone cannot? How must language be understood? Our task crosses conventional genre distinctions, exploring the relationships between philosophy and literature by developing the conceptual and ethical delimitations of what would otherwise appear to be a merely aesthetic problem as well as exploring the non-conceptual and incalculable continuation of those effects in the work of literature. If language is strictly finite and strictly fragmentary, finitude alone cannot account for its possible meaning; there must be something else without which meaning would not appear. At the same time, without any universal guarantee of meaning, one must still give an account of its meaning. Texts can only be interpreted without hope of yielding their ultimate "truth." "Truth" can only be as finite as the texts themselves. Through readings of Theodor W. Adorno, Soren Kierkegaard, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Kafka, the project develops the implications of and the need for giving an account of textual meaning, developing in particular through the readings of the literature of Rilke and Kafka, a new understanding, on the basis of linguistic finitude, of the project for a literature of ethical praxis