Möbian Nights Literary Reading in a Time of Crisis

“I died at Auschwitz,” French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, “and nobody knows it.” Möbian Nights: Literary Reading in a Time of Crisis develops a new understanding of literary reading: that in the wake of disasters like the Holocaust, death remains a premise of our experience rather than a future.

Challenging customary “aesthetic” assumptions that we write in order not to die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we write to die. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett), Möbian Nights proposes that all literature works “autobiographically”, which is to say, in the wake of disaster; with the credo “I died; therefore, I am”; and for which the language of topology (for example, the “Möbius strip”") offers a vocabulary for naming the “deep structure” of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics.

Part One. Möbian Turns: Reading Literature
Introduction: Difference as Continuity
1. After The Tragic Vision: Krieger and Criticism, Lentricchia and Crisis
2. Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration
3. Witnessing the Impossible: Felman, Laub, and the Trauma of Testimony
4. Documenting Fiction: Kolitz, von Beeck, Levinas, and Holocaust Witness
5. “The Mother's Part”: Love, Letters, and Reading in Sondheim's Passion
6. “And Darkness Upon the Face of the Deep”: Legacies of Night in Wiesel, Mauriac, Cayrol, Blanchot, and Levinas
7. “Did We Die During the Night?” Nathan Englander's “Prayer for the Dead”
Part Two. Versions of Night: Reading Darkness
8. The Möbian, Criticism, and Literature
9. The Möbian and the Aesthetic
10. The Song of the Abyss: Foucault, Homer, and Autobiography
11. The Sirenes and the Posthumous: Blanchot and Death
12. The Promissary and the Prophetic: Derrida and Levinas
13. Homer, Homecoming, Hospitality, and Hostage Status
14. The Möbian, the Literary, and the Posthumous
Conclusion: Literature, Darkness, and Ashes
Bibliography
Index

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