Sartre believed that man is a passion inutile, and it is then possible that passion is ultimately useless and futile, but along the way it is indispensable and life-giving.
Literary passions I-II set out to bear witness to a condition that Thomas Mann has given the best description of: "Devotion in union with recognition - that is exactly what passion is".
The first volume contains readings of Danish poetry from Ingemann and Aarestrup to Signe Gjessing, a section on Johannes V. Jensen and a discussion of important concepts in narrative analysis.
The second volume organizes an ongoing dialogue with international philosophy and literary theory, often in connection with significant poets in German, English and American literature, e.g. Hölderlin, Rilke, Celan, Wordsworth and Stevens.
Contents 1. Harold Bloom. Agonist 2. Literary pathos. From Aristotle to Bloom 3. “Oh you”. Address forms at Ewald 4. To remember the enthusiasm. The traces of the revolution in Hölderlin 5. Wordsworth's poem. An appreciation 6. The nature of the creative imagination. Wordsworth 7. Poststructural, postmodern, postpost… Theory, literature, reading 8. Subject and intentionality. From new criticism to deconstruction 9. Paul de Man and the sublime criticism 10. Guides in Kannitverstan. Deconstruction and modern hermetics 11. The rehabilitation of rhetoric and rhetorical reading 12. Voices of the Light. Thinking and poetry in Heidegger 13. Labor, pain and line. Jünger and Heidegger 14. The allegories of the failure. Lines between Frankfurt and Yale 15. Organic wholeness and ironic time. Paul de Man's reading of the theory of the novel 16. “I can't go on, I'll go on”. Adorno and the modern novel 17. Nordic and European modern 18. Fear, cry, communion. The sublime in Burke, Adorno and Stevens 19. The metiers of nothingness and the figurations of bliss. Wallace Stevens
