Idylls of the Wanderer: Outside in Literature and Theory - Hardcover

"Henry Sussman's Idylls of the Wanderer invites the reader to join in a journey of discovery that knows neither fixed goal nor certain return. Instead, each new twist and turn reveals unexpected perspectives and aspects that challenge established expectations and conventional certitudes. A journey not to be missed!" -- -Samuel Weber * Northwestern University * . . . Sussman's highly original, trailblazing work. * -Symploke * Explores ideas of exteriority and interiority in literary and philosophical writings, including works by James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, William Faulkner, and James Joyce. * -The Chronicle of Higher Education * Those who consider, for example, Joyce's Finnegans Wake an inexhaustible vein of gold (as opposed to a verbal junkyard) will find Sussman's vertiginous prose illuminating and exhilerating . . . * -Choice * "A superb investigation, through careful reading of examples of what it means to be outside or to experience the outside." -- -J. Hillis Miller * University of California, Irvine *

This book is an extended inquiry into the dimension of exteriority constructed by philosophical systems and literary works. Literature has, since its inception, depended on a rogue's gallery of outsiders-the more outlandish the better, with human attributes optional-as the impetus to its events and the motive for its developments. Philosophers have also vacillated between safeguarding the purity and consistency of their systematic projects and embracing contamination by alien and intransigent elements. The unsettling encounter between interiority and exteriority is a philosophical and literary sideshow not nearly as frivolous as it might seem. Building upon Nietzsche's fatal confrontation "The Wanderer and His Shadow" and Jacques Derrida's initiation of the current era in critical theory with the formulation "The outside is the inside," the author pursues the vicussitudes of the dimensional frontier in a wide range of artifacts and authors. Among these are James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. A welcome is further extended to the peculiar sublime introduced in the Zohar and in the texts of Georg Buchner, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Paul Celan.