The point of view of the author : intersections in philosophy and literature

Abstract

The question of this thesis is what does it mean to write under the temporal categories, or categories of understanding of, repetition, recurrence and return. Naturally, before the question can be dealt with, these categories must be investigated, as well as set off against the traditional categories which they aim to expand. The method of exposition utilized within the thesis is meant to walk, as it were, hand in hand with its content. The content being largely the "three R's" mentioned above, the thesis accordingly repeats, recurs and returns to the same ideas and the same metaphors, throughout. The materials incorporated within the thesis include, but are not limited to, the philosophical writings of Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida, as well as the literary writings of William Faulkner, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Cees Nooteboom. There are no acknowledged borders between literature and philosophy within the thesis; instead I work from the tautological premise that a text is a text. The conclusion of the thesis is, at best, inconclusive. My methods of elucidation may be quite foreign to some readers. Through working as a tutor with Japanese exchange students for several years, I have found that rather than stating and continually restating the thesis throughout the course of the essay, starting away from the goal and from there slowly circling in upon it, in an elucidatory spiral, with the thesis, or center, being reached substantially for the first time only at the end, is more to my liking as a method.