قراءات إضافية
المصادر الرئيسية
Published works: I myself first
acquired a taste for Kierkegaard in the older translations
by Walter Lowrie and David and Lillian Swenson, and many
people still prefer them because they are more graceful and
flowing and because they better preserve Kierkegaard’s
sparkling wit. I have occasionally used them here to give
the reader an example of the good fortune the first
generation of Anglophone readers had in their encounter with
Kierkegaard. Most of these books can still be acquired in
used paperback editions. The new translations, which are now
the standard, are more technically correct and organized,
but I find them more literal and awkward: Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans.
and ed. Howard and Edna Hong et al., 26 volumes (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1978–2000); they come equipped
with a stunning scholarly apparatus and system of
annotations. Alastair Hannay’s translations (Penguin Books)
are more critical than the older ones and more felicitous
than the Hongs’.
Journals: I occasionally cite the
beautiful translation made in 1939 by Alexander Dru for
Oxford University Press and reprinted in The Journals of Kierkegaard, trans.
Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torch books, 1959; reissued
Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003). This is a splendid
place to start reading Kierkegaard. Alastair Hannay,
Søren Kierkegaard: Papers and
Journals: A Selection, trans. Alastair Hannay
(London and New York: Penguin Books, 1996), a much larger
selection, is an excellent translation that is the next best
thing to read. The usefulness of the most comprehensive
translation, Søen Kierkegaard’s
Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V.
Hong and Edna H. Hong, 7 vols (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1967–78), is impaired by an unhappy
decision to group the entries topically instead of
chronologically.
سير ذاتية
Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1938) and A Short Life of
Kierkegaard (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942)
are old chestnuts, but a bit hagiographical. Josiah
Thompson, Kierkegaard (New York: Knopf, 1973), is quite
incisive and demythologizing but a bit cynical. Thompson is
a predecessor of the truly comprehensive (866 pages) and
highly demythologizing biography by Joakim Garff,
Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). The account
that I like most, that balances an insightful intellectual
history with critical biographical detail, is Alastair
Hannay, Kierkegaard: A
Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).
مصادر ثانوية
Bruce Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age
Denmark (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990) is an invaluable resource for the times in
which Kierkegaard lived. David Cain, An Evocation of Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: C.
A. Reitzel, 1997), a ‘coffee-table’ book of photos with
accompanying text, is a beautiful and touching tribute to
the place where Kierkegaard lived.
The Cambridge
Companion to Kierkegaard, eds. Alastair
Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1997) is a superb collection of studies by
experts.
Robert Perkins has done a great and
unflagging service of editing International Kierkegaard Commentary (Macon,
GA: Mercer University Press, 1984–), a series of
commentaries that appear in conjunction with each of the
Princeton University Press translations; every major
Kierkegaard scholar has contributed to these
books.
James Collins, The Mind of Kierkegaard
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983) is a reissue
(with an updated annotated bibliography) of a 1953 book,
revised in 1965, which remains to this day one of the best
places to go for a first-rate
introduction.
Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971) is another splendid
introduction, but this time with a literary
twist.
George Pattison, Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding
Discourses (London: Routledge, 2002) is the
best place to get an angle on literature I neglected in this
book. Pattison is one of the very best Kierkegaard people
writing in English and a significant thinker in his own
right.
A very good treatment of the
Heidegger/Kierkegaard relation is John Edward van Buren,
The Young Heidegger
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1994).
Space does not permit me to go on,
but if, in addition to these books and the books I cited in
the notes, one keys in the following names for ‘author’ with
Kierkegaard as the ‘subject’ on Amazon.com, one will come up
with any number of first-rate studies still available in
English: Jon Elrod, C. Stephen Evans, Henning Fenger, M.
Jamie Ferreira, Bruce Kirmmse, Louis Mackey, Gregor
Malantshuk, John Lippitt, Edward Mooney, Jolita Pons,
Michael Strawser, Josiah Thompson, Niels Thulstrup, Sylvia
Walsh and Merold Westphal. They take a variety of approaches
and do not by any means agree with one another, but they
have produced well-written and well-argued studies that
repay study.
قراءات ما بعد حداثية
Apart from more traditional studies,
there is today broad interest in Kierkegaard as a
predecessor figure for ‘posttnodern’ thought. Two excellent
collections will get you started in that direction:
The New Kierkegaard,
ed. Elsebet Jegstrup (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2004) and Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, eds Martin Matustik
and Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1995). In the 1980s, Mark C. Taylor edited ‘Kierkegaard and
Postmodernism’, a book series for Florida State University
Press. Sylvian Agacinski, Aparte (1988) and Louis Mackey,
Points of View
(1986), were the most important books in the series. Taylor,
a leading postmodern theorist today, started out in
Kierkegaard—Journeys to
Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2000)
(reissue).
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David
Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) is a
striking deconstructive approach taken by the later Derrida.
It corrects the slant given to Kierkegaard by Emmanuel
Levinas, Proper Names,
trans. Michael Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1996).
Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2001) gives a Derridean reading of the
political implications of
Kierkegaard.
Roger Poole, Indirect Communication (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1993) is a good example of
what an enthusiast of the early Derrida would make of
Kierkegaard; see also his ‘The Unknown Kierkegaard:
Twentieth Century Interpretations’, in The Cambridge
Companion to Kierkegaard, eds. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D.
Marino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
