Abstract

Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts is a collection of fourteen essays that illuminate the broad and often underappreciated variety of the nineteenth-century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s engagements with literature and the arts. These essays, contextualized with an insightful introduction by Eric Ziolkowski, explore Kierkegaard’s relationship to literature (poetry, prose, and storytelling), the performing arts (theater, music, opera, and dance), and the visual arts and film. The collection is rounded out with a final comparative section that considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with a romantic poet (William Blake), a modern composer (Arnold Schoenberg), and a contemporary singer-songwriter (Bob Dylan). Kierkegaard was as much an aesthetic thinker as a philosopher, and his philosophical writings are complemented by his literary and music criticism. Bringing together insights from an international group of Kierkegaard scholars, Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts will offer much of interest to scholars concerned with Kierkegaard as well as teachers, performers, and readers in the various aesthetic fields discussed. About the Author Eric Ziolkowski is the Helen H. P. Manson Professor of the English Bible and head of the Department of Religious Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Reviews "Eric Ziolkowski’s Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts is a thought-provoking exploration of Kierkegaard’s treatment of the aesthetic generally, and of the arts individually. Ziolkowski has done a masterful job of organizing the essays as mutually illuminating contributions on a variety of themes, such as receptivity and engagement, immanence and transcendence, and Bildung and disruption. Throughout, Ziolkowski and his contributors engage these issues with a lively sense for the apt metaphor, for the revealing historical and cultural reference, and for the sheer variety of voices and forms that comprise the Kierkegaardian authorship." —Vanessa Parks Rumble, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Boston College