Humanity's Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy

(Hardback)

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Humanitys Strings: Being, Pessimism, and Fantasy interrogates the nature of reality against fantasy as the two are presented to and created by the human consciousnessa consciousness that is in constant struggle with the omnipresence of misery and the inevitability of death. The book shows that being, pessimism, and fantasy as the strings which are made up of forces unseen, unknown, and ungoverned that control the human being like a puppet. Through a study of the metaphysical and existential philosophies of thinkers, such as Franz Brentano, Edmund Husserl, Sren Kierkegaard, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida, the book interrogates not only how the self interacts with fantasy but why it does as well. It also asks why fantasy forces the self towards a unity that impacts existence in the modern world with its questions of justice, politics, and materiality. Furthermore, it situates the fantasy novels of authors, such as Stephen King, Brandon Sanderson, Douglas Adams, and Robert Jordan, as discourses which delineate the considerations above as ideas which modulate the existence of the human. Additionally, the book shows how it is not just the human that is affected by the machinations of the cosmos but also time and spaceostensibly a priori entities of existenceas these two interact with the human and its consciousness.

Author Bio

Ritwick Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English, SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi. He has done his MPhil from the Department of English, University of Delhi. His research interests are in fantasy studies, phenomenology, continental philosophy, Indian English novels, disability studies and graphic novels. His publications range from academic articles on philosophy, fantasy, politics, disability and translation to journalistic articles and fiction.