The Early 20th Century Discourses on the Epic andthe Novel, and the Ontological Matrices of the Modernist Time

Arnab Bhattacharya

Time is a recurrent motif in the Western discourses onthe novel, especially those written in the early partof the 20th century. Here I am not talking about thenarrativised time of the novel which is the theme ofnarratology like Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse : AnEssay in Method. The time that concerns me in this paperis the one in which the novel came into being andstarted developing by leaps and bounds. The discoursesI will consider here are the ones which explore theontological dimensions of the novelistic time as partof a contrastive design pitting it against the epicaltime and the time of the ancient storytelling,highlighting features specific to the novel asexpressions of the time it embodies. The threerepresentative early 20th century discourses which Ihave selected for discussion here are Georg Lukács’ TheTheory of the Novel, written as a draft in the summer of1914 and revised into its final version in the winterof 1914-15, Walter Benjamin’s article “The Storyteller”in his book Illuminations (1968), and Mikhail Bakhtin’sarticle “Epic and Novel” in his book Dialogic Imagination(1981). My aim will be to show how all these three

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discourses in their very specific conceptualizations ofthe modernist novelistic time and pre-modernistepical/storytelling time insist on a rupture separatingthe two, and yet radically differ in their delineationsof the former’s attitude to the latter.

The Theme of “Immanence of life” in Lukács’ The Theory ofthe Novel

Lukács’ “The Epic and the Novel” begins with a strongnote on the ‘historio-philosophiocal’ distinctionbetween epic writing and novel writing. In Lukács’words:

the epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epicliterature, differ from one another not by their authors’fundamental intentions but by the given historico-philosophicalrealities with which the authors were confronted. The novel isthe epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is nolonger directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in lifehas become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms oftotality. It would be superficial—a matter of a mere artistictechnicality—to look for the only and decisive genre-definingcriterion in the question of whether a work is written in verseor prose. (1971)

It is thus not a question of form which differentiatesthe epic and the novel, rather the realities in whichthese genres were nurtured in two different ages, andthe philosophies which informed them which, accordingto Lukács, were the motive forces behind thedevelopment of their distinguishing features. It is,

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however, not immediately obvious what point Lukács isdriving at when he uses the phrases ‘immanence ofmeaning’ and ‘extensive totality’. He certainly cannotmean lack of fissiparous elements in the epic society,because these were superabundant in epical texts forwhich no scholastic insight is needed. It probablyindicates a self-sufficiency, not obviously in economicterms (for that would be a ludicrously naïve analysis),but in a cosmic sense which was reflected in how theepic characters interpreted the world and internalizedthe spirit of the time. This perception engendered asense of totality which the individual characters didnot conceive themselves as fragments of, but embodyingit in their personas. It is a sense which is there inthe epic as a given from which the epic action sprang,and the epic characters derived their motivation,courage and strength. There is no questioning it, nodoubting it, nor even a quest for it. Lukács elucidatesa little later in that article:

The epic gives form to a totality of life that is rounded fromwithin; the novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct

the concealed totality of life. The given structure of theobject (i.e. the search, which is only a way of expressing thesubject’s recognition that neither objective life nor itsrelationship to the subject is spontaneously harmonious initself) supplies an indication of the form-giving intention. Thusthe fundamental form-determining intention of the novel isobjectivised as the psychology of the novel’s heroes: they areseekers. (ibid.)

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Thus for Lukács the novelistic time is a struggle forfinding a totality which is now no longer given, nor‘rounded from within’, but ‘concealed’, in need eitherto be uncovered or constructed. The ‘search’ is a kindof manifestation of Heideggerian ‘homesickness’ towardsa ‘wholeness’. As Heidegger explains,

What is all this, taken together: world, finitude,individuation? What is happening to us here? What is man, thatsuch things happen to him in his very ground? Is what we knowof man: the animal, dupe of civilization, guardian of culture,and even personality---is all this only the shadow in him offinding quite other, of that which we name Dasein? Philosophy,metaphysics, is homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere, a demand,not behind and without direction, but one which awakens us to such questions asthose we have just asked and to their unity: what is world, finitude, individuation?Each of these questions inquires into the whole. (1995, p-6,emphasis mine)

This passage immediately calls to mind the openingsentences of Lukács’ book which look upon the epicalworld as an integrated one with an explicit longingfor it. To quote him briefly:

Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full ofadventure and yet their own. The world is wide and yet it islike a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the sameessential nature as the stars; the world and the self, thelight and the fire, are sharply distinct, yet they never becomepermanent strangers to one another, for fire is the soul of alllight and all fire clothes itself in light. Thus each action ofthe soul becomes meaningful and rounded in this duality: com-plete in meaning—in sense—and complete for the senses; rounded

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because the soul rests within itself even while it acts;rounded because its action separates itself from it and, havingbecome itself, finds a centre of its own and draws a closedcircumference round itself. ‘Philosophy is really homesick-ness,’ says Novalis: ‘it is the urge to be at home everywhere.’( ibid.)

This kind of homesickness which we identify with anovelistic quest for a lost or concealed totalitywhich, in its turn gets reflected in the novel’sgeneric stylistics, is a function of Heideggerian Da-sein, literally meaning ‘being there’— a theme whichHeidegger extensively dwells on in Being and Time.Heideggerian Da-sein is inextricably bound up with arestlessness, an excruciating groping towards an everelusive ‘possibility’. In his words,

Dasein always understands itself in terms of a possibility ofitself: to be itself or not to be itself. Dasein has eitherchosen these possibilities itself, or got itself into them, orgrown up in them already. (1962, p-33)

In case the Da-sein is ‘grown up’ in the possibilitiesas a pre-given set as in the epical time, the being-in-itself is at peace with its being-with-the-worldwith little chance of a conflict. But when heencounters possibilities in order to be, then he has todecide which ones to choose to become its ‘authentic’(1) self. The novelistic time wants to hark back tothat pre-ontological time when neither ontic norontological (2) exigencies put it under duress. I

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think Heideggerian conception of pre-ontological stateof Da-sein comes proximally close to Lukács’ notion of‘immanence of totality’. As Heidegger says In History ofthe Concept of Time “consciousness is immanent being”(1979, p-103), we feel such a consciousness ischaracteristic of Lukácsian epical time. Heideggerelaborates on this ‘immanence’:

Formally, immanence implies, first of all, to be inanother….Immanence is asserted of a relation which is possiblebetween lived experiences themselves, between the reflectingact and the reflected. Between the reflecting experience andthe reflected, the objective element in the reflection, there arelation of real inclusion in one another…. Immanence is not adetermination of the entity in itself with regard to its being,but a relation of two entities within the region of livedexperiences or consciousness. (ibid., p-103)

In Lukácsian analysis this absolute immanence of ‘thereflecting experience and the reflected’ accounts forthe non-interiority of subjectivity of the epic hero,who lives and dies for his community with his beingembedded within “an organic life complex”.(1971.) Inthe epic world, the relation between an individual andhis community is never the one between the part andthe whole, for these are indistinguishable, oneflowing into the other. Lukács explains:

The omnipotence of ethics, which posits every soul asautonomous and incomparable, is still unknown in such a world.When life quae life finds an immanent meaning in itself, thecategories of the organic determine everything. (ibid.)

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In the world of the novel, according to Lukács, systemhas replaced the ‘rounded totality’, abstraction hastaken the place of the concrete, emphasizing “theconventionality of the objective world and theinteriority of the subjective one”. (ibid.)But thisabstraction is informed with a metaphysical‘homesickness’ for an epical ‘immanence’ of life, “thenostalgia of the characters for Utopian perfection, anostalgia that feels itself and its desires to be theonly true reality”. (ibid.)

The Theme of “Communicability of Experience” in WalterBenjamin’s “The Storyteller”

In Illuminations, Walter Benjamin writes on NikolaiLeskov in the essay “The Storyteller” and in so doingtakes occasion to study the evolution that the art ofstorytelling has undergone over ages. Benjamin writesthat storytelling was a communitarian act, which wasaimed at giving and taking counsel. But the modernisttime epitomized by the novel is the one in whichexperience was interiorized to the extent that thecommunicability of the experience waned. Counsel, asBenjamin believes, is wisdom woven into the real life,which was transmitted through these stories whichformed an enormous part of oral literature. To hismind, “the secular productive forces of history”(1968, p-87) gradually removed the narrative from the

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realms of the living speech. The emergence of thenovel is concomitant with the decline of oralliterature which represents organic/integrative epicaltime. Benjamin’s distinction between these two genresis captured in these words:

What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from theepic in the narrower sense) is its essential dependence on thebook. The dissemination of the novel became possible only withthe invention of printing. What can be handed on orally, thewealth of the epic, is of a different kind from whatconstitutes the stock in trade of the novel. Whatdifferentiates the novel from all other forms of proseliterature–the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella–is thatit neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. Thisdistinguishes it from storytelling in particular. (ibid., p-87)

The point Benjamin stresses here is that the novel, byvirtue of its very writtenness, is a bounded entitywhich the ancient stories or legends or epics whichwere capable of being transmitted orally were not. Thelatter reserved the ability of being retold any numberof times, and every retelling added a new layer ofmeaning to a previous narration, making theirinterpretability inexhaustible. The printing presstechnology which lent a kind of authenticity to thenovelistic text put paid to, once and for all, thepossibility of variations. Another point that Benjaminhighlighted about the delimitation of the novel’scapacity for producing meanings is the novelisticpenchant for incorporating psychological analysis. The

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novelist, Benjamin opines, is so intent on passinginformation through narration in order to appearplausible, that the reader’s freedom of interpretingthe story the way he likes becomes severelyrestricted. To drive his point home Benjamin retells astory from Herodotus’ Histories which is about theEgyptian king Psammenitus, showing how its abrupt andenigmatic ending elicited different responses fromreaders in different ages. But in the novel, Benjaminrues, the information which comes by way of analyses,can never aspire to outlive the moment when it ispassed. Obviously, a la Lukács, Benjamin views thenovelistic time as an enclosed one accounting for therigidity of its style and structure. In contrast, theepical/storytelling time is expansive and regenerativewhich has a sense of eternity woven into it. While thenovelist is an individual speaking to anotherindividual, the storyteller/epicist is a member of acommunity speaking to other members; while thenovelist is an artist, the storyteller is a craftsman.Benjamin quotes from Paul Valery who talks about theancient craftsmen’s collective and cumulative creativeefforts:

…all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort arevanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter.Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.(ibid. p-93)

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“The time is past in which time did not matter” is atelling phrase which brilliantly sums up the epicaltime. It was the time in which, according to bothLukács and Benjamin, experience rather thaninformation was shared, the time in which thecommunity formed an experiential pool with thenarrator and his audience set adrift in it. Thenovel’s individual is like Don Quixote who lives ananachronistic community life, his interiorized selfbelongs to a community which has ceased to exist. HisDa-sein is caught in an agonising time warp, hisnarrative is embroiled in a present which bears anunmistakable stamp of ‘within-timeness’ which, inHeideggerian terms, strives for the ‘care’ whichindicates “the structural unity of the Being” (1962,p-235). To quote from Heidegger’s Being and Time:

The fundamental ontological characteristics of this entity areexistentiality, facticity and Being-fallen. These existentialcharacteristics are not pieces belonging to somethingcomposite, one of which might sometimes be missing; but thereis woven together in them a primordial context which makes upthat totality of structural whole which we are seeking. In theunity of those characteristics of Dasein’s Being which we havementioned, this Being becomes something which it is possiblefor us to grasp as such ontologically. (ibid., p-236)

But this possibility defeats itself because ‘Being-fallenness’ is an ontological determinant of themodernist time which the novel’s hero epitomizes. Inits tireless effort, the hero’s Da-sein can only afford

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to be an honest seeker and a gallant loser. The DonQuixote in him looks for his ‘potentiality-for-being-awhole’ in his ‘being-in-the-world’ ness with a deepunderlying sense of absurdity. In Heidegger’sphilosophy, however, there is no fixed ortranscendental ‘primordial’ time which we can call‘epical’. He conceives of time or temporality not asan entity, but a process of ‘ecstases’ in which onesegment flows into the other. In a famous phrase hesays, “Temporality temporalizes, and indeed ittemporalizes possible ways of itself”. (ibid., p-377)Temporalization is such a process which rounds off thejagged and rugged patterns of time in a temporal flowin a peculiar self-descriptive and self-perpetuatingmanner. In Heidegger’s words:

What is characteristic of the ‘time’ which is accessible toordinary understanding, consists, among other things, preciselyin the fact that it is a pure sequence of ‘nows’, withoutbeginning and without end, in which the ecstatical character ofprimordial temporalitiy has been leveled off, But this veryleveling off, in accordance with its existential meaning, isgrounded in the possibility of a definite kind oftemporalizing, in conformity with which temporalitytemporalizes as inauthentic the kind of time we have justmentioned. (ibid., p-377)

What Lukács identifies as the epical time with itscharacteristic ‘immanence of totality’ and Benjamin asthe storytelling time with the possibility of‘communicability of experience’ are, in fact, the

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primordial time, which was once there as a given witha structure of wholeness in which the relation betweenan individual and his community was not that between apart and the whole, but one of totality to itself,because everyone belonged to the same existentialplane. Unlike Heidegger, they do not look upon alltemporal segments as ‘equiprimordial’ but as asequence punctuated by closures and ruptures. Thenovelistic time, according to them, is ‘inauthentic’because it is divorced from the primordial andcohesive epical/storytelling time. The madness of DonQuixote lies in the absurdity that, being rooted inthe ‘inauthentic’ time, he transposed his self to the‘authentic’ time; and the absurdity compounded itselfbecause he did not understand the absurdity of thesituation. The novel’s heroes are fundamentally absurdmen, they differ among themselves to the extent theyacknowledge this absurdity or remain oblivious of it.Their task is Sisyphean, in that they strive hard toget a measure of the authentic time, knowing full wellthat their efforts are doomed to failure, and thatfailing once, they will have to start all over again.The potentiality-for-being-a-whole is an obsessionthat motivates the novelistic hero through thenovelistic time, but the motivation is without a hopefor its realization. Like ‘the absurd man’ in AlbertCamus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, he lives ‘without appeal’(1975, p-64) and with full knowledge of his temporal

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limitation. Here I quote a few sentences from thechapter “The Absurd Man” to elucidate my point.

‘My field,’ said Goethe, ‘is time.’ That is indeed the absurdspeech. What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, withoutnegating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgiais foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and hisreasoning. The first teaches him to live without appeal and toget along with what he has; the second informs him of hislimits. Assured of temporally limited freedom, of his revoltdevoid of future and of his moral consciousness, he lives outhis adventure within the span of his lifetime. (ibid., p-64)

The novel’s hero is nostalgic, he does sustain theHeideggerian kind of ‘homesickness’. But he is sofettered by his consciousness with his time thatdetermines his mode of being that his homesickness canonly be an agonizing quest for a time lost forever,and hence unattainable. He realizes that, but thatdoes not cure him of his nostalgia. He prefers hisailment to his cure for the simple reason that in thisvery ailment he finds a specific and a special cure.It is only through his nostalgia that he can connecthimself to the primordial, pre-ontological timecomparable to an Edenic bliss whereas, an amnesia, hebelieves, will land him in an abysmal void. As in InMemoriam, Alfred Tennyson writes, “’Tis better to haveloved and lost than never to have loved at all”(2004), so the novelistic hero plausibly argues thathis painful longing for a ‘structure of totality’connects him to a pleasure of Heideggerian ‘fore-

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having’ (3) while losing the pain itself willautomatically nullify the pleasure as well.

The Idea of Polyphony in Mikhail Bakhtin’s DialogicImagination

In the first chapter “Epic and Novel : Towards aMethodology for the Study of the Novels” of his DialogicImagination, Mikhail Bakhtin takes a diametricallyopposed view of the novelistic time to that of Lukácsand Benjamin. For Bakhtin, the primordial epical timeis dead and gone, and the novelistic time, far fromnourishing a homesickness for that, celebrates itsfreedom from it. While the old genres like epics are‘hardened’ and ‘inflexible’ (1981, p-1), the novel,according to Bakhtin, is full of dynamism andinexhaustible possibilities. Bakhtin severelycriticizes the 19th century poetics which highlightedthe ‘organic wholeness’ (1981, p-5) of ancient genres,neglecting the novel which was generally considered adegenerate literary form, not fit to be included inthe canon of ‘high literature’. Bakhtin takes occasionto look at the matter from the other end of thebinocular, in that he makes strength out of thenovel’s proverbial weakness. What the 19th centurythinkers and theoreticians dismissed asfragmentariness and incompleteness of the novelistictime, Bakhtin eulogizes as flexibility and open-endedness; what they viewed as the novel’s nostalgic

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longing for a lost totality of immanence, Bakhtincharacterizes as the novel’s extraordinary ability toincorporate and also to parody the traditionalelements in its tractable body. In his own words:

The novel parodies other genres (precisely in their role asgenres); it exposes the conventionality of their forms and theirlanguage; it squeezes out some genres and incorporates othersinto its own peculiar structure, reformulating and re-accentuating them. (ibid., p-5)

While the earlier poetics judged the novel from thepoint of view of the epical time and pointed out itsshortcomings, the later poetics, developed after thenovel had grown to a level of maturity, judged theepical literature from the novel’s point of view,showing where the novel scored over the epic. Bakhtinshows how the novel writers self-consciously tried tosteer clear of the traditional genres’ “stiltedheroizing, their narrow and unlifelike poeticalness,their monotony and abstractness, the pre-packaged andunchanging nature of their heroes”. (ibid., p-10) Thethree traits that Bakhtin identifies as the novel’sintrinsic features are, i) stylistic three-dimensionality connected with multi-languageconsciousness, ii) its potent impact on the temporalcoordinates of the traditional images, iii) itsmaximal contact with the present or the contemporary.(ibid., p-11) These are the characteristics whichbeing combined together give effect to what Bakhtin

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calls ‘polyphony’ in Problems in Dotoevsky’s Poetics, implyingsublime autonomy of the novel’s characters who liveout their own lives and realities and voice their ownviews independent of the novelist’s peremptorycontrol, revealing multiple dimensions of thenovelistic time. Bakhtin writes:

A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuinepolyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels.What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters andfates in a single objective world, illuminated by a singleauthorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciouness with equalrights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of theevent. (1984, p-6, italics authors)

It is absolutely clear from this citation what Bakhtinmeans by ‘polyphony’ of a novelistic discourse andwhat features of the novelistic time he celebrates asits unique, high points. We get from the translator’sfootnote that the word ‘event’ in the translation isan equivalent of the Russian word ‘sobytie’ whose literalrendering would be “co-existing, co-being, sharedexistence or being with another”. (ibid., p-6) And itis here that we touch upon the nerve node of theontological matrix in the Bakhtinian analysis of themodernist/novelistic time. In Bakhtinian conception,totality as a theme is approached from a differentstand-point altogether. While Lukács and Benjamininterpreted the epical/storytelling time, and thecommunity life which engendered it, as an absolutely

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integrative one, where an individual did not emerge asan individual per se, but as a micro-community, like anatom retaining all properties of the matter it is apart of, Bakhtin conceives of the novelistic time asan epitome of another kind of totality, a synthesizingone, which accommodates the ‘several worlds andseveral autonomous consciousnesses” (ibid., p-16) asin Dostoevsky’s “internally dialogic” (ibid., p-32)art. When Bakhtin says, “To affirm someone else’s ‘I’not as an object, but as another subject — this is theprinciple governing Dostoevsky’s world-view” (ibid.,p-10), his words echo the kind of subjective autonomythat Edmund Husserl speaks of in The Basic Problems ofPhenomenology in such a statement as “ in each case,the I has a limited spatial temporal surrounding,which it immediately perceives, or, as the case maybe, which it remembers in immediate, retentionalmemory”. (2006, p-2) ‘The ‘potentiality-for-being’ ofthe novel’s characters is not, according to Bakhtin,characterized by a nostalgic longing for theprimordial time, but by a yearning for co-existingthrough acknowledged differences which is informed bya modernist ontology which regards Da-sein as anidentity in manifold. In the Bakhtinian line ofthinking, the Heideggerian ‘care’ which is always‘ahead-of-itself’ is a structure of differentiated and notimmanent wholeness. In Identity and Difference, Heideggerpoints out that in traditional ontology which had its

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strong votary in Hegel, Being with a capital B wasaccepted as the ground of all beings as well as anaccount for it. The modernist ontology, whichHeidegger calls ‘onto-theology’, the Being with acapital B is given over all beings which “appear byvirtue of their differences”(1969, p-64), which comeover to the originary Being in transparency, and yetin a certain opacity triggered by an inherentdistinction. In Heidegger’s words

Being transits (that), comes unconcealingly over (that) as whicharrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that comingover. Arrival means: to keep concealed in unconcealedness—toabide present in this keeping— to be a being. (ibid., p-64)

In Bakhtinian analysis of the novelistic time theauthorial being approaches the beings of othercharacters as ‘something of itself’, and yet differentfrom it, different in order for them to be. While inLukács’ and Benjamin’s theses, the epical/storytellingtime is characterized by a Hegelian ontology of asupreme Being, that of community, as the ground ofother beings, and the novelistic time by ahomesickness for it, in Bakhtin’s discourse thenovelistic time emerges as an endless process oftransitions and arrivals of the Being and the beings,and thus bringing forth its unique differentiated‘totality’.

In the end, I like to add that all the theoreticiansdiscussed in this article regard the modernist time as

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a clean break from the ancient time. This approach isfraught with difficulties. First, the theory ofepical-storytelling time as one springing fromcommunity lifestyle with individual memberscelebrating their “immanence of meaning” is not anuncontested one. Friedrich Nietzsche, for one,dismisses such a philosophy as dogmatist, pointing outin his unsparingly caustic style that every communityhas a way of tyrannizing over the individuality of theindividuals. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writesthat in the community life “The lofty independentspirituality, the will to stand alone, and even thecogent reason, are felt to be dangers, everything thatelevates the individual above the herd, and is asource of fear to the neighbour, is henceforth calledEVIL, the tolerant, unassuming, self-adapting, self-equalizing disposition, the MEDIOCRITY of desires,attains to moral distinction and honour.” (1885, p-116). And then, the rupturist view of the modernisttime does not accord with the ontological notion thattakes time as a constitution of an endless string of‘nows’ looking back to ‘having beens’ and lookingforward to ‘not yets’. I reserve this subject forsome other article in future.

NOTES

1) According to Heidegger, Da-sein can be either ‘authentic’ and‘inauthentic’ depending on its potential to be itself andnot to be itself. In Being and Time Heidegger insists that

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Da-sien must choose possibilities which will propel itsexistence towards authenticity.

2) In Husserlian phenomenology, the ontic is that region ofbeing where the being appears in their respectivenaturalness, marked by science and common sense, whereasthe ontological is that region where the being rises up inorder to understand its very being. Heidegger literallyturns the Husserlian formulation upside down in that in TheBasic Problems of Phenomenology he conceives of the movementfrom the ontic to the ontological as one of dipping down toa level the structure of being constitutive of variousentities comes to light.

3) “Fore-having” is a concept which Heidegger used as a twistto the Kantian model of a priori. In Kantian philosophy, aphenomenon is said to be an a priori if it exists before andirrespective of the perception of an individual, or a beingin Heideggerian sense. Heidegger insists that there isanother ‘before’ before the Kantian ‘before’ or a priori, andthat one consists in the being’s knowing or ‘seeing’ of thephenomenon’s having been there, or, in other words, itshaving the phenomenon beforehand. This is ‘fore-having’,which coupled with ‘fore-sight’, produces a third structureknown as ‘fore-conception’.

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, Mikhail, Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (ed. MichaelHolquist, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist).University of Texas Press, Texas, USA, 1981

——— Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (ed.& tr. Caryl Emerson).University of Minnesota Press, London, UK, 1984.

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Benjamin, Walter, illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. HarryZohn). Schocken Books, New York, USA, 1968.

Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus (tr. Justin O’Brien).Penguin, Middlesex, UK, 1975.

Lukács, Georg, The Theory of the Novel : A Historico-Philosophical Essay onthe Forms of Great Epic Literature (tr. Anna Bostock). Merlin Press,London, UK, 1971. Retrieved from www.lanzarotecaliente.com

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time (tr. John Macquarrie andEdward Robinson). Basil Blackwell, Oxford, UK, 1962.

——— Identity and Difference (tr. Joan Stambaugh). Harper & Row,New York, USA, 1969.

——— History of the Concept of Time : Prologmena (tr. TheodoreKiesiel). Indiana University Press, Bloomington, USA, 1979.

——— The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics : World, Finitude, Solitude(tr. William MacNeill and Nicholas Walker). IndianaUniversity Press, Bloomington, USA, 1995.

Husserl, Edmund, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (tr. IngoFarin & James G. Hart). Springer, Dordrecht, Netherlands,2006 retrieved as an e-book (ISBN-13 978-1-4020-3789-4)from www.springer.com.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Beyond Good and Evil. Free e-bookretrieved from www.planet ebook.com.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Poems. The World’s Poetry Archive,PoemHunter.Com, 2004. Retrieved from www.poemhunter.com.

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