ABSTRACT

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) is a crucial thinker for anyone who wants to make sense of the traumatic story of twentieth-century European history, and who believes more generally that it is the purpose of thinking to illuminate the world around us. She is an acknowledged figure in the fields of political theory, philosophy, modern history and cultural studies, and she is also a guiding spirit for the emerging fields of holocaust studies and Jewish studies. Alongside its elucidation of Arendt’s key political and philosophical ideas, a central purpose of this book will be to claim Arendt for literary studies. It will consider the ways in which Arendt’s work can help us to think about the role of literature, and in particular literary narrative, in making sense of history and of our cultural and political identity. Arendt valued story telling over philosophical thinking for its attentiveness to the singular nature of human experience. Her work consistently challenged hegemonic and absolute notions of ‘truth’ by proposing a new way of understanding the relationship between the particular human self, the community in which that self is found and the wider world. Literature offered Arendt a crucial resource in under taking this departure from the philosophical tradition. ‘No philosophy’, she wrote in a late essay, ‘can compare in intensity and richness of meaning with a properly narrated story’ (MDT: 22).