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Reviewed by:
  • The Literary Kierkegaard by Eric Ziolkowski
  • Julie K. Allen
Eric Ziolkowski. The Literary Kierkegaard Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2011. xi–xx + 423 pages.

The claim by Edward Mooney on the back cover of The Literary Kierkegaard that “nothing like this book now exists” requires a caveat—this study is in fact very similar in orientation and approach to the multivolume Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources series, which exhaustively catalogues and investigates various authors’ influence on Søren Kierkegaard, his use of their texts, characters, and ideas, and the reception of Kierkegaard’s works across the globe. Eric Ziolkowski’s book is nonetheless a very useful, insightful, and relatively compact survey of thematic and hermeneutic connections and parallels between Kierkegaard and several important authors. Using Kierkegaard’s description of himself as a “literary weed” as a point of departure, Ziolkowski enters the longstanding debate over the nature of Kierkegaard’s work in order to reaffirm “the essentially literary as opposed to strictly theological or philosophical nature of [Kierkegaard’s] writings” (4). While this is not a novel argument, Ziolkowski defends his position with erudition and nuanced argumentation, demonstrating keen awareness of the complexity of Kierkegaard’s authorial strategies and adeptly illustrating the “limitless complexity of the literary Kierkegaard” (257).

The overarching aim of the book seems to be to demonstrate the inextricability of the often-competing religious and literary aspects of Kierkegaard’s œuvre. The Literary Kierkegaard contains five chapters that explore particular textual relationships between Kierkegaard and Aristophanes, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Carlyle, bracketed by a self-contained introduction and conclusion. The case studies fall into two categories: genealogical analyses of how Kierkegaard’s work builds on and refashions the ideas [End Page 1260] of authors whose work he read and quoted (Aristophanes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare), and analogical analyses that compare Kierkegaard’s work to that of authors with whose work he was not familiar but who share some of his existential concerns. The book proceeds chronologically, which helps to smooth over some of the sense of disjunction that can result from the repeated shifts between these two treatments of the material. Although the density of the text and its webs of allusions may be daunting to the uninitiated, the book is intended to help readers “to survey, to probe, and to interpret . . . and to decipher and to decode wherever necessary, the linkages between [Kierkegaard’s] writings and those of other literary masters” (4).

Ziolkowski initially frames his investigation in terms of Kierkegaard’s relationship as a Christian thinker to the aesthetic with the provocative question: “How could a Christian, a true Christian in the full Kierkegaardian sense of a person radically engaged in a life of religious resignation, suffering, guilt, repentance, and faith, be enamored of aesthetics, a branch of philosophy focused upon beauty and the beautiful, especially as they become manifest in poetry and the fine arts?” (5) To answer this question, Ziolkowski traces the emergence of aesthetics as an independent field of study, from Baumgarten’s use of the term “aesthetics” in the late eighteenth century to “designate the rationalist-philosophical study of poetry and art as a systematic science sui generis” and Catholic and Protestant writers’ use of it to describe an attitude which they “find to be frivolous, merely curious and self-indulgent” through Hegel and the German Romantics to Kierkegaard’s adaption of the term to designate the “existential stage of immediacy and reflection” (8).

The second task of the introduction is to establish Kierkegaard’s self-identification as a poet and prose stylist, including the autonomous order of the texts created by his pseudonyms. Ziolkowski documents Kierkegaard’s experimentation with different literary genres as evidence of his literary orientation and interprets Kierkegaard’s self-description as a “literary weed” as a prognostication of his later role as a “gadfly” in his attacks on the Danish church. Ziolkowski’s primary evidence for the characterization of Kierkegaard as a literary writer derives from his depiction of Kierkegaard as a prolific and wide-ranging reader who incorporates, transforms, challenges, and responds to the texts he reads within his own texts: “The literary Kierkegaard examined in the present study exists largely in...

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