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).