Exceptionally Common Courage: Fear and Trembling and the Puzzle of Kierkegaard's Authorship (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780881468076)

EXCEPTIONALLY COMMON COURAGE provides an extended, close reading of FEAR AND TREMBLING, Kierkegaard's pseudonymous book about Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. It then fits this (in)famous work into the broader and puzzling corpus that includes both other pseudonymous works and signed discourses by this same mercurial author. The scholarly debates inevitably generated by any treatment of FEAR AND TREMBLING are here addressed in ways that arise from a detailed interpretation of the text itself without letting secondary material interrupt the primary train of thought. Along the way, Kierkegaard's ideas are brought into conversation with a much broader than usual cannon of interlocutors, including such figures as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and James Baldwin, R.H. Tawney and Wendell Berry. As the chapters unfold, this understanding of faith as a form of courage provides not just direction, but a topographical score for what is originally a highly indirect and elusive textual arrangement.

Author: Kevin Hoffman
ISBN-10: 088146807X
ISBN-13: 9780881468076
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Language: English
Published: 10/01/2021
Pages: 240
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.98h x 5.98w x 0.71d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 08/01/2022