Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death

Download or read book Muriel Spark, Existentialism and The Art of Death written by Cairns Craig and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-20 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Proposes that Christian existentialism and, in particular, the work of Søren Kierkegaard, helped shape Spark's religious commitments and her artistic innovations. Because of the prominence, after the Second World War, of the atheistic existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, it is often forgotten that existentialism was originally a Christian philosophy, shaped by followers of Kierkegaard such as Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel. The author traces in Spark's writings both the influence of Kierkegaard and of Spark's resistance to Sartre's co-option of existentialism to an atheistic agenda. Kierkegaard's analysis of the nature of the "aesthetic" as a false mode of existence that has to be transcended by the ethical and then by the religious provides a fundamental structure for Spark's satirical analyses of the failings of the modern world.