ABSTRACT
George Pattison examines Kierkegaard's upbuilding portrayal of "The Woman Who Was a Sinner" as a model of imitatio Christi that befits even the rigorous standards set forth by Anti-Climacus. It is only at this point, having shown the continuity of the upbuilding with writings of both "lower" and "higher" pseudonyms, that Pattison plays his final card: the figure of Socrates, wending his way through works of all three categories. Pattison must rescue the discourses from charges dating to the 1840s: that they are boring, dogmatic, and detract from Kierkegaard's interest to the "philosophy, literature, and theology" of Pattison's title. The complex, formidable argument is a marvelous contribution to Englishlanguage Kierkegaard scholarship: a book-length interpretation of the upbuilding discourses as the hermeneutic key to Kierkegaard's corpus. Pattison has long argued that "even the direct is indirect" in the upbuilding discourses, and that Kierkegaard's "best works and most fruitful insights transcend this duality."
