Book contents
- Heidegger and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy
- Heidegger and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Heidegger and Literature: An Introduction to the Question
- I Literature and Poetry
- 1 Heidegger’s Literary Secret
- 2 The Event’s Foreign Vernacular
- 3 Shared Habits: Love, Time, and The Magic Mountain in 1925
- 4 From Tool to Poem
- 5 Heidegger’s Use of Poetry
- II Heidegger and Greek Literature
- III Heidegger and Literary Works
- Heidegger, Index of Works
- General Index
- References
3 - Shared Habits: Love, Time, and The Magic Mountain in 1925
from I - Literature and Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2023
- Heidegger and Literary Studies
- Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy
- Heidegger and Literary Studies
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Heidegger and Literature: An Introduction to the Question
- I Literature and Poetry
- 1 Heidegger’s Literary Secret
- 2 The Event’s Foreign Vernacular
- 3 Shared Habits: Love, Time, and The Magic Mountain in 1925
- 4 From Tool to Poem
- 5 Heidegger’s Use of Poetry
- II Heidegger and Greek Literature
- III Heidegger and Literary Works
- Heidegger, Index of Works
- General Index
- References
Summary
This chapter uses Heidegger’s and Arendt’s joint reading in 1925 of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) to argue that Heidegger’s lived literary practice in the 1920s does not match the invocations of poetic specialness that the philosopher theorizes from the mid 1930s onwards. Drawing on Heidegger’s letters to Arendt, as well as on the lecture courses from the mid 1920s which Heidegger used to clarify the arguments that became Being and Time, the chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s response to Mann’s novel. The episode suggests a counterfactual alternative mode of Heideggerian literary reading. Mann’s novel, as a model to think with, emphasizes the exchange with others and the competing discourses that resist grounding in a more fundamental viewpoint, such as the phenomenological ontology of the early Heidegger or the “thinking” of the later Heidegger. At the same time, the reading of Mann allows us to re-contextualize Heidegger’s engagement with his scientific and philosophical contemporaries, such as Einstein, Bergson, and Russell.
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- Heidegger and Literary Studies , pp. 51 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023