The Point of View : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol 22 |
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Author:
Soren Kierkegaard
By Princeton University Press
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List Price: $95.00
Our Price: $75.96
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Product Description
As a spiritual autobiography, Kierkegaard's The Point of View for My Work as an Author stands with such great works as Augustine's Confessions and Newman's Apologia pro vita sua--but with a difference. It is neither a confessional autobiography nor a defense. It is an author's story of a lifetime of writing, his understanding of the common aim and comprehensive coherence of the maze of his greatly varied pseudonymous and signed works. In an earlier work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard acknowledged his authorship of the series of pseudonymous works that began with Either/Or. With the imminent publication of the second edition of Either/Or, the pseudonymous series would come full circle, and Kierkegaard again intended to cease writing. Now was the time for a direct "report to history" on the authorship as a whole. In addition to the resulting Point of View, which was published posthumously, the present volume also contains the companion pieces Armed Neutrality and On My Work as an Author, a contemporary substitute for the postponed Point of View. Supplementary entries taken from Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers document the context and the development of the writings on the authorship as a whole. In addition, they disclose Kierkegaard's considerations as he wrestled with decisions about publishing the three works and other works that were the "fruit of the year 1848 ... the year of my richest productivity."
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Probably the place to start in reading Kierkegaard, 2002-08-13
The greatest challenge for any newcomer to Kierkegaard is finding the best place to gain an overview. In my opinion, this is the finest place to start. In the main work in this collection, THE POINT OF VIEW (the book also contains some smaller pieces on his Authorship), Kierkegaard sets out to explain his purposes and strategy in writing the books constituting what he calls his Authorship. Students of Kierkegaard generally refer to these books as his Pseudonymous Authorship, because in all of these he writes none of them under his own name, but employs a variety of fictionalized authors, who represent a particular point of view that is not that of Kierkegaard himself. The Pseudonymous works are contrasted with what has become to be known as Kierkegaard's Second Literature (a descriptions attributed to Kierkegaard scholar Robert L. Perkins), which comprises his edifying works and his later religious works, most of which were published under Kierkegaard's own name, though with a couple of his greatest later works published under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus.Some of these works, such as EITHER/OR I, contain writings on a variety of aesthetic topics. Many of the books deal with either ethical or religious topics, though the latter never from within a religious perspective. Kierkegaard's main argument in the POINT OF VIEW is that from first to last he was, even when writing on aesthetic topics, a religious author. The Pseudonymous works all presuppose a theory of stages, which Kierkegaard describes as moving from the aesthetic to the ethical and into the religious (the precise prepositions, according to SK, being of the utmost importance). It is not clear that Kierkegaard had a precise understanding of all this at the moment he was writing the first of his Pseudonymous works, but it is unquestionable that he moved to this point of view fairly early on. This little volume is, therefore, a wonderful introduction to Kierkegaard's most famous works, and remains one of the most fascinating reflections by a great writer on the nature of his own work ever written.
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 198.9
EAN: 9780691058559
ISBN: 0691058555
Label: Princeton University Press
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 376
Publication Date: 1998-05-11
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press |
