In this Book
- The Other Night: Dreaming, Writing, and Restlessness in Twentieth-Century Literature
- Book
- 2009
- Published by: Fordham University Press
summary
I sleep, but my heart wakes,says the Song of Songs. The other nightnames the sleepless night we spend in dreams.From The Interpretation of Dreams to Finnegans Wake, many of the great writing projects of the first half of the twentieth century articulate experiences of waking in the very depths of sleep, where no Ican declare itself present though the heart still beats. After World War II, in the cold light of the closure of the age of dreambooks, Beckett and Blanchot discover with new clarity, and new fatigue, that what wakes when the Isleeps doesn't sleep when the Iwakes.Revisiting Freud's argument that the dream is a form of writing, The Other Night looks at how life becomes literature in this wakefulness. Though we seem to be seeing things in our dreams, we are actually confronted with a kind of writing. This writing is not in our power, and yet it is ours. We are responsible for it in the same strange way that we are responsible for our lives.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-xii
- Introduction: The Other Night
- pp. 1-22
- Two: Dream and Writing in Blanchot
- pp. 48-68
- Three: Beckett’s Restlessness
- pp. 69-88
- Four: Finnegans Wake
- pp. 89-108
- Afterword: The Dream and Writing of Socrates
- pp. 109-118
- Selected Bibliography
- pp. 139-148
Additional Information
ISBN
9780823248261
Related ISBN(s)
9780823228652
MARC Record
OCLC
801846658
Pages
176
Launched on MUSE
2012-06-26
Language
English
Open Access
No