ABSTRACT
This
study examines, from a deconstructionist perspective, the interface of
literature and philosophy through a literary-critical study of selected
works of the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose
corpus has historically been appropriated by academic philosophers as a
contribution to the truth-conditional propositions of philosophy. In
spite of their philosophic inclination, Nietzsche's works also have a
powerful attraction to literary scholars who find in his work modes of
exploring the relationship between fact and fiction, philosophical and
literary discourse, text and author, text and truth, text and reader,
perspectivism and interpretation, writing and narrativity, and
representation and rhetoric. Using the conceptual resources of
Deconstruction, this study contends that Nietzsche's texts demonstrate
why the arbitrary nature of the relationship between signifier and
signified makes meaning-making of any kind problematic since meaning
itself is not grounded in some absolute contact with reality, but is
carried in language. Thus through a close reading of his key texts such
as "The Birth of Tragedy", "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" and "Ecce Homo", the
study shows how these works bring together, through the agency of
language, narrativity, form and style, philosophical and literary
discourses and their modes of presentation. This conflation of the
philosophical and the literary domains foregrounds Nietzsche's desire to
get people to become what they truly are, namely "works of art" or
"literature" which give birth to themselves through the techniques of
narrative perfection. The study as a whole also highlights the
complicated ways in which Nietzsche has exploited the resources of
narrativity, laughter, dance and literary form in his writings, thus
demonstrating the manner in which his writing shows great sensitivity
towards literary form and the style of presentation. This trend as
illustrated by Nietzsche's creative and unique deployment of a complex
structure based on a stylized combination of such artistic or literary
resources as aphorisms, fragments, hyperboles, metaphors, verses,
wordplay, fictions and fictionalizations, all intended not for
integration into an over-arching narrative structure, in effect a
"meta-narrative". In their own way, then, the selected works of
Nietzsche are veritable literary-philosophic discourses on Tragedy (plot
and characterization), Speech (as laughter), the Self (as dance),
Writing (as play), and Representation (as narrativity and literary
form). Nietzsche occupies an eminent position in post-modern culture
through the integration of literary and philosophical modes of
representation that creates the space for diversity and relativism, for
open-endedness in thought and for the authenticity of divergent modes of
signification.
