I died at Auschwitz, French writer Charlotte Delbo asserts, and nobody knows it. M?bian Nights: Reading Literature and Darknessdevelops 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 ordernotto die, Sandor Goodhart suggests (with Kafka) we writetodie. Drawing upon analyses developed by Girard, Foucault, Blanchot, and Levinas (along with examples from Homer to Beckett),M?bian Nightsproposes 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 M?bius strip ) offers a vocabulary for naming the deep structure of such literary, critical, and scriptural sacrificial and anti-sacrificial dynamics.
Sandor Goodhartis Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Purdue University, USA. He is the author of editor of five books, including
The Prophetic Law. Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical(2014),
Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity(co-edited with Ann Astell, 2011) and
For Ren? Girard. Essays in Friendship and Truth(co-edited with J?rgen J?rgenson, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams, 2009).
In this beautifully written and strikingly original contribution to post-Holocaust literature, Sandor Goodhart locates in the M?bian structure first described by 19th-century mathematician August Ferdinand M?bius a model for difference or otherness that, in fact, attests to continuity and sameness. Tracing in M?bian fashion an autobiographical line extending from Homer to Beckett, Goodhart shows that we never stand outside the drama the literary presents to us. Suggesting that M?bian logic is endemic to all literary critical discourse, GoodhalsZ
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