1. EXISTENTIALISM IN AMERICAN FICTION

2. EXISTENTIALISM (term coined by Gabriel Marcel) -A school of philosophy in the 20 th century which focuses on human individual existence and lived experience. -Emerges after World War II, when questions about freedom and responsibility arise. -Representatives : Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alber Camus (France); Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich (Germany); Jose Ortega y Gasset (Spain) -Forerunners in literature: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka (foreshadowing existentialism: St. Augustine’s Confessions, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Voltaire’s Candide )

3. The Road Not Taken Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost (1874-1963)

5. René Descartes (1596-1650 Cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am The kind of philosophy that is NOT existentialist: Cartesianism

6. Who “does the thinking”? The thinking subject (an abstract entity)

11. EXISTENTIALIST THEMES -Concrete existence -Freedom -Responsibility -Anti-systematic thought -Affectivity: moods, emotions (love, hate, etc.) -The subjectivity of truth(s)

12. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Forerunners of existentialism in philosophy

13. What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. (Kierkegaard in a letter to Peter Lund)

14. Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) Being and Nothingness (1943) Freedom Choice Responsibility en-soi (in-itself) vs pour-soi (for itself) Existence precedes essence

15. The “waiter-thing”

16. The “doctor-thing”

17. The “soldier-thing”

18. 1925 F.S. Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

19. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. […] So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

20. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) Notes from Underground (1864)

21. (1914-1994) (1952)

22. The motto of Pencey Prep: “Since 1888, we have been molding boys into splendid, clear-thinking young man” (1951) (1919-2010)

23. *(1944) Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

24. (1956)

25. Then his mother had made the mistake of mentioning her nephew Artie, Wilhelm’s cousin, who was an honor student at Columbia in math and languages. [...] He was now a professor, this same Artie with whom Wilhelm had played near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on Riverside Drive. Not that to be a professor was in itself so great. How could anyone bear to know so many languages? And Artie also had to remain Artie, which was a bad deal. But perhaps success had changed him. Now that he had a place in the world perhaps he was better. Did Artie love his languages, and live for them, or was he also, in his heart, cynical? ( Seize the Day p.16)

26. Philip Roth (b. 1933)

27. All I can tell you with certainty is that I, for one, have no self, and that I am unable to perpetrate upon myself the joke of a self. [...] What I have instead is a variety of impersonations I can do, and not only of myself—troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required, an ever-evolving stock of pieces and parts that forms my repertoire. But I certainly have no self independent of my imposturing artistic efforts to have one. Nor would I want one. I am a theater and nothing more than a theater. ( The Counterlife 320-21)

28. Raymond Carver (1938-1988) “I suppose I began to drink heavily after I'd realized that the things I'd wanted most in life for myself and my writing, and my wife and children, were simply not going to happen. It's strange. You never start out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar.” (Carver in an interview) Minimalism