Abstract

Sheehan deals with relatively recent authors—Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Beckett. He is critical of humanism, by which he seems to understand a kind of anthropocentric and limitative image of human beings, imposed on the public by narrative, among other things. As against this, he is setting the animal, the mechanical, and the transcendental, but the definition of the latter is, to say the least, bizarre—“the ability to evade compromise and contingency”. Reformulating narrativity is, according to Sheehan, the best attempt or search by the moderns to define a new kind of human. His whole project is, to put it bluntly, rather confused. There are some intelligent and original commentaries on Schopenhauer, for instance but Sheehan soon falls back under the spell of Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Terry Eagleton and seems to contribute rather few original comments to the discussion. In a word, this is a good example of how the interface philosophy/literature ought not to be visited.