Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

4. This chapter gives a detailed account of LTMKs significance, unveiling important new influences and contexts. It provides an original reading of the novel centring on idiocy.

3. This chapter considers Waiting for the Barbarians with relation to a thematics of impasse and bafflement. It argues Coetzee designed the novel to stall the emergence of meaning.

This essay outlines Brecht’s relation to Marxism along three dimensions. First, it examines his Marxist influences including Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Karl Korsch, and Fritz Sternberg. Second, it explores Marxist reactions to him, particularly those of GeorgLukács and Theodor Adorno. Lastly, it investigates his influences on Marxist thought vis-à-vis Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Rancière, and others. It shows that not only was his work heavily influenced by the movement, his thought also occupies an often-unrecognized central position within it.

Herbert of Cherbury saw himself as a peacemaker. In De Veritate (1624) Herbert posits that religious conflict will disappear once people realize that they share core beliefs, monotheistic essentials he dubs the Common Notions in a nod to Stoicism. He proposes to refute skepticism by isolating criteria for truthful cognition: chiefly, conformity and consent. Why did Herbert, a champion of truth and enemy of skepticism, end up embracing skeptical impartiality and neutrality? The chapter argues that Herbert changes owing to his experiences during the Civil War and as a diplomat, but also following his work of the 1630s, composing his histories:Expedition to the Isle of Rhé and The Life and Reign of Henry VIII. Yet the seeds for this change are already present in his philosophy of mind, growing out of the appreciation for beauty implicit in his ideals of conformity and consent. The chapter shows that the corollaries of Herbert’s philosophy extend beyond political accommodation to neutrality and aesthetic detachment. Herbert’s work constitutes a valuable case-study of the connections forged between epistemology and politics in the turbulent second quarter of the seventeenth century.

The chapter examines the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, the foundational text for Jesuit practice, and finds there a rich psychoanalytic dynamism between satisfaction and frustration, imagination and reality, and an insistent demand for a creative, affective response to the problems it forces the exercitant to face.

The Epilogue considers various ways in which a rhetoric of longing and of overcoming the distance between a modern individual and a personified antiquity could be challenged or modified, giving new valency to notions of historical distance, the neutral, the stranger, and cognitive dissonance.

This chapter examines the long history of depictions of Hamlet with Yorick’s skull, acknowledging that this composition has a longer history than that of the play itself. Considering versions of the ‘Yorick still’ in relation to medieval and early modern memento mori art, I argue firstly that photography was a significant determining factor in this image’s rise to prominence and ubiquity. Secondly, I suggest that the uncanny qualities of the photograph, as they are discussed for instance by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, allow photographs based on Hamlet to revive some of the spectral qualities of the memento mori. The chapter concludes with reflections on ‘playing dead’ in photographs of Hippolyte Bayard and Sarah Bernhardt.

This chapter investigates modernist biofictions, with a particular focus on Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945). Engaging with Virgil’s texts and the ancient biographical traditions about him, Broch’s novel neatly foregrounds the interactions between biofiction, classical reception and the literary, intellectual and political preoccupations of the first half of the twentieth-century. The novel’s title proleptically echoes Roland Barthes’ famous essay on the modern ‘Death of the Author’, self-consciously bringing techniques of intertextuality to bear on the biofictional reception of Roman poetry, as, in Broch’s words, Virgil’s text and biography are ‘continuously interwoven’ (‘fortlaufend eingewoben’) with his own. It is steeped in the author’s reading of Freud, engaging with contemporary psychoanalytical techniques to construct Virgil as a biofictional subject. Finally – written partly in a Gestapo prison – the novel puts biofiction at the heart of twentieth-century political concerns. As the ostensible biofictional entity ‘Virgil’ merges in an interauthorial dialogue with ‘Hermann Broch’, biofictional reading of Roman poetry becomes a medium for interrogating the role of art at a time of cultural and political crisis.