Sean Burke
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748618309
- eISBN:
- 9780748652075
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748618309.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Beginning amidst the tombs of the ‘dead’ God, and the crematoria at Auschwitz, this book confronts Nietzsche's legacy through the lens of Plato. The key question is how authors can protect against ...
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Beginning amidst the tombs of the ‘dead’ God, and the crematoria at Auschwitz, this book confronts Nietzsche's legacy through the lens of Plato. The key question is how authors can protect against the possible ‘deviant readings’ of future readers and assess ‘the risk of writing’. The author recommends an ethic of ‘discursive containment’. The ethical question is the question of our times. Within critical theory, it has focused on the act of reading. This study reverses the terms of inquiry to analyse the ethical composition of the act of writing. What responsibility does an author bear for his legacy? Do ‘catastrophic’ misreadings of authors (e.g. Plato, Nietzsche), which played a part in the establishment of totalitarian regimes such as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, testify to authorial recklessness? These and other questions are the starting point for a theory of authorial ethics.Less
Beginning amidst the tombs of the ‘dead’ God, and the crematoria at Auschwitz, this book confronts Nietzsche's legacy through the lens of Plato. The key question is how authors can protect against the possible ‘deviant readings’ of future readers and assess ‘the risk of writing’. The author recommends an ethic of ‘discursive containment’. The ethical question is the question of our times. Within critical theory, it has focused on the act of reading. This study reverses the terms of inquiry to analyse the ethical composition of the act of writing. What responsibility does an author bear for his legacy? Do ‘catastrophic’ misreadings of authors (e.g. Plato, Nietzsche), which played a part in the establishment of totalitarian regimes such as Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, testify to authorial recklessness? These and other questions are the starting point for a theory of authorial ethics.
