Nihilism and modernity
Louis‐Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the end of the night
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8962940 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jose Luis Romanillos (0000-0001-7188-6222, Geography College of Life and Environmental Sciences University of Exeter Exeter Devon EX4 4RJ, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 40 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 128-139 |
| Publication date | 2013-10-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/tran.12046 |
| OpenAlex | W1985570884 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 34 |
This paper explores Louis‐Ferdinand Céline's 1932 Journey to the end of the night within the context of growing work on the literary geographies of modernity. The paper argues that Céline's novel can be productively aligned with other texts such as Ulysses or Heart of darkness as a way of thinking about the experiences of modernity in terms of a spatial disorientation that provokes new kinds of writing. At the same time, Céline's novel is distinctive because it presents the experience of modernity as one of nihilism. In particular, the novel diagnoses the ‘creative‐destructive’ project of modernity through a narrative of abjection and disenchantment, asking readers to question the dialectical promise, and idealist pretensions, of the term. This paper explores how this nihilistic writing is expressed spatially through the parodic ‘journey’ that structures the narrative, and the different nihilistic landscapes dramatised across the novel. The paper proceeds by examining understandings of modernity within literary geographies, and interpretations of nihilism, before exploring some of the central spatial moments of the novel: the deathscapes of World War I, French Colonial Africa and New York. The paper concludes by reflecting on the ways in which Céline's writing could be said to make manifest the spatial experiences of modernity
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Dialectic · Disenchantment · Epistemology · Literature · Modernity · Narrative · Nihilism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Travel Writing and Literature
Nihil Unbound
Powers of Horror
Trauma
Schopenhauer
Nietzsche and Philosophy
An Introduction to Nietzsche as Political Thinker
Geographies Of Modernism
Paris, Capital of Modernity
A Choice of Nightmares
In defence of utopian urbanism
Literary geography
The View from a Rump
Primo Levi and the genre of testimony
Mobility as Resistance
Towards a critical analysis of fictive geographies
Recovering inspiration in the spaces of creative writing
Environmentalism and Eurocentrism
The City in Textual Form
From beyond
The spectral geographies of W.G. Sebald
The spatial supplement
The production of space
The world as will and representation
The condition of postmodernity
Text as It Happens
Geography's Empire
Outside, it is Snowing
Céline and the Jews
Culture and Imperialism
Case Interrupted
Psychoanalysis and the Polis
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,17 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2017 (4) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |