HARVARD STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Cover: The Way of Oblivion in PAPERBACK

Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature 44

The Way of Oblivion

Heraclitus and Kafka

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PAPERBACK

$15.95 • £13.95 • €14.95

ISBN 9780674948037

Publication Date: 10/15/1998

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If Heraclitus is one of our most ancient writers, Kafka seems especially modern. They share in a struggle between disclosure and obscurity that is perhaps as old as writing itself. In this lucid and engaging volume, David Schur takes us from philosophy to literature and back in a sustained examination of a fundamental philosophical metaphor: the way or path of method. Through close readings of texts by Heraclitus, Plato, Heidegger, Blanchot, and Kafka, he follows the development of a rhetorical commonplace into a distinctly Heraclitean paradox of method, concluding that Kafka’s account of the way beyond mortal existence renews Heraclitus’s emphasis on oblivion in the search for truth.

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