Möbian Nights

Sandor Goodhart is 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 René Girard. Essays in Friendship and Truth (co-edited with Jørgen Jørgenson, Tom Ryba, and James G. Williams, 2009).

In this beautifully written and strikingly original contribution to post-Holocaust literature, Sandor Goodhart locates in the Möbian structure first described by 19th-century mathematician August Ferdinand Möbius a model for difference or otherness that, in fact, attests to continuity and sameness. Tracing in Möbian 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 Möbian logic is endemic to all literary critical discourse, Goodhart, at once an astute philosopher and consummate Jewish storyteller, attests to the 'doubling back of language on itself' in a dark night that makes all writing 'the story of my death.'

• Preface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Möbian Turns: Difference as Continuity1. After The Tragic Vision: Krieger and Criticism, Lentricchia and Crisis2. Disfiguring de Man: Literature, History, and Collaboration3. Witnessing the Impossible: Laub, Felman, and the Trauma of Testimony4. Documenting Fiction: Kolitz, van Beeck, Levinas, and Holocaust Witness 5. “And Darkness Upon the Face of the Deep”: Counter-Redemptive Hermeneutics in Wiesel, Mauriac, Cayrol, Blanchot, Levinas, and Genesis 16. Criticism, Literature, and the Möbian7. Literarary Reading, the Möbian, and the PosthumousConclusion: Versions of Night: Reading Literature and DarknessBibliographyIndex