Either/Or Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Marc Katz

Critical Essay by Marc Katz

SOURCE: Katz, Marc. “Confessions of an Anti-Poet: Kierkegaard's Either/Or and the German Romantics.” In Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature, edited by Gregory Maertz, pp. 227-45. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Katz discusses Kierkegaard's sense of his own marginality in relation to German Romanticism.

What seems less the picture of a living person than a silhouette? And yet, how much it tells us!

[Was kann weniger Bild eines ganz lebendigen Menschen seyn, als ein Schattenriß? Und wie viel sagt er!]

—Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente

Although Søren Kierkegaard began Either/Or in Copenhagen, he wrote the bulk of it in an apartment on Gendarme Square in Berlin, where he spent the better part of 1841 escaping the public fallout from his breakup with Regine. As a Bildungsreise [journey of education] the trip was unusual, in that he fed off and collected...
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