Abstract
The “word [solitude],” Maurice Blanchot wrote with some impatience, “has been much abused.”1 This study does not intend to contribute further to such abuse: its aim is to facilitate our under-standing of a deceptively contentious and ambiguous issue. It cannot tell the whole “story” of solitude, but it highlights one of the most critical points in the arc of its long history, the period after the Great War (WWI) to Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy, published in the early 1950s.
Oh, who could tell us the story of this subtle feeling, which is called solitude.
Nietzsche, Dawn of Day
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Notes
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 10.
Recent works on Modernism are too many to cite, but several are of special interest: Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, tr. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1991);
Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990)
the Introduction to Ann Quéma’s The Agon of Modernism: Wyndham Lewis’s Allegories, Aesthetics, and Politics (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 11–29.
In a limited way, the ambiguity of solitude is raised by Aleksandra Gruzinska in “From Musset to Cioran: Sampling and Taming Solitude” Journal of the American Romanian Academy of Arts and Sciences no. 20 (1995), 64–75.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 64.
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© 2001 Edward Engelberg
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Engelberg, E. (2001). Preface. In: Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10598-1_1
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