The Kierkegaardian Author: Authorship and Performance in Kierkegaard’s Literary and Dramatic Criticism

This study engages in a detailed examination of Kierkegaard’s works of literary and dramatic criticism, including those works directed at interpreting Kierkegaard’s own authorship, with a specific concern for both what Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard’s anonyms and pseudonyms write about the nature and practice of authorship, as well as how the Kierkegaardian authors practice authorship themselves. Moving through five chapters, each devoted to one or more works of Kierkegaard’s criticism, the study develops a new approach to reading Kierkegaard – a new Kierkegaardian hermeneutic – that begins always with the character of the author. This new approach avoids the challenges of critics of biographical criticism, such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, by positing the author always as a work of fiction him- or herself, the creation of an unknown and ever anonymous “author of the author”.