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What is the pertinence for Roth's The Dying Animal, Everyman, and "Novotny's Pain" of the existential outlooks of Heidegger and Sartre? What, moreover, are the implications for Roth's fiction of Heidegger's mortuary conception of Dasein in the unification of past, present, and future, as opposed to Sartre's conceiving of consciousness as nothingness, or lively possibility ? And why do Roth's narratives favor Sartrean possibility over the deterministic claim to "possibilization" in Heidegger's "resolute" cognizance of death? Such are the questions I address, with attention to the interplay of philosophy and aesthetics in Roth's narrative artistry, and in related reference to "Novotny's Pain." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading John Donne's "A Valediction: Of Weeping" in conjunction with Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness invites us to compare the "nothingness" they exalt to Imogen's Irigarayan view of a materialized sexuality in the three aubades of Cymbeline's first act. As he fosters the verbal possibility produced by the impossibility of love, Donne anticipates Sartre's dictum that "man's relation to being is to modify it." In contrast, Imogen challenges the idea that, in Luce Irigaray's terms, we "constitute [ourselves] through our productions" and suggests instead a "culture of growth" that renders language as an "oeuvre" of the "flesh." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Herman Melville was so estranged from the religious beliefs of his time and place that his faith was doubted during his own lifetime. In the middle of the twentieth century some scholars even associated him with nihilism. To date, however, no one has offered a detailed account of Melville in relation to Nietzsche, who first made nihilism a topic of serious concern to the Western philosophical tradition. In this essay, I discuss some of the hitherto unexplored similarities between Melville's ideas and Nietzsche's reflections on and reactions to the death of God and the advent of nihilism in the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]