Irony as a way of life : Svevo, Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis
Abstract
Dejected by decades of commercial and critical failure, the Triestine author Italo Svevo found fresh inspiration for his final novel (La coscienza di Zeno, 1923) in the writings of Freud. Yet critics have always puzzled over his declared intransigence toward his new master, often attributing this ambivalence to a simple defence mechanism. But what if Svevo had been reading other works simultaneously, works that challenged and exposed the weaknesses of psychoanalytic authority? As this article argues, Svevo’s recently discovered reading of Kierkegaard’s ‘existential irony’ sheds light on his conception of the power of both narrative and the analytical process itself.
Citation
Bond , E F 2016 , ' Irony as a way of life : Svevo, Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis ' , Philosophy and Literature , vol. 40 , no. 2 , pp. 431-445 . https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2016.0029
Publication
Philosophy and Literature
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0190-0013Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2016.0029
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