TY - BOOK ID - 142029681 TI - Narratives of nothing in 20th-century literature AU - Vicks, Meghan AU - Bloomsbury Academic PY - 2015 SN - 9781501307218 PB - New York London New Delhi [etc.] Bloomsbury Academic DB - UniCat KW - Nothing (Philosophy) in literature. KW - Narration (Rhetoric) KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / Eastern (see also Russian & Former Soviet Union). KW - LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French. KW - Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich KW - Beckett, Samuel KW - Pelevin, Viktor KW - Criticism and interpretation. KW - Criticism and interpretation. KW - Criticism and interpretation. UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:142029681 AB - "The concept of nothing has been an enduring concern of the 20th century. As Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each positioned nothing as inseparable from the human condition, essential to the creation or operation of human existence,as Jacques Derrida demonstrated how all structures are built upon a nothing within the structure, and as mathematicians argued that zero - the number that is also not a number - allows for the creation of our modern mathematical system, Narrative of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature suggests that nothing itself enables the act of narration. Focusing on the literary works of Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, and Victor Pelevin, Meghan Vicks traces how and why these writers give narrative form to nothing, demonstrating that nothing is essential to the creation of narrative-how our perceptions are conditioned, how we make meaning (or madness) out of the stuff of our existence, how we craft our knowable selves, or how we exist in language"-- "Explores how 20th-century literature gives narrative form to nothing and why nothing is essential to the creation of being, narrative, and other systems of meaning-making"-- ER -