Abstract

In less than two decades of his writerly career, Nietzsche produced fourteen texts, in addition to essays and poetry. This Nietzschean production that often transgressed disciplinary boundaries brought him little recognition during his lifetime. But as Nietzsche foresaw, "some are born posthumously." Ironically, the Nietzschean claim to fame began in the century with the misappropriation of his texts by his sister in the Nazi cause. It is only recently, since the fifties, that the facts of the Nietzschean texts have been separated from the fictions of the Nietzsche myth. ;However, as Nietzsche's posthumously published Will to Power asserts, "facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations." My study of Nietzsche attempts to examine the facts of Nietzsche's life along with the interpretations that his texts demand. The primary argument of this study is that a substantial portion of Nietzschean discourse is mythopoeic, i.e., consciously crafted artificial writing. Nietzschean mythopoeia in turn, I argue, is predicated on parodic tropes. Finally, I also attempt to examine, if only in passing, the laughter that Nietzschean parody generates, creating him an artist of comic wisdom. ;After an initial analysis of some recent theories of parody and a tentative definition of Nietzschean parody, I read his Birth as a mythopoeic text and rooted in his theories of metaphor, language, history and truth. I then trace the Nietzsche's mythopoeic paradigm as manifested in the works of his positivistic phase and suggest that it is interspersed with parodic images, culminating in the full-scale parodic mythopoesis of The Gay Science. It is in his next text, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Nietzsche comes into his own as a mythopoeic parodist. My reading of Zarathustra as a parody of ontotheology also bring to light Nietzsche's comic wisdom, best manifested in Zarathustra's affirmative laughter. As a meta-discourse, I offer an analysis of Nietzsche's genealogical essays to elucidate his writerly impulses to mythopoeia and parody, seen for instance this time, in his "Dionysus Dithyrambs." By way of a conclusion, I offer a revisionist sketch of Nietzsche's fate in the late twentieth-century academia and assess his value for our time