부산대학교 도서관

Summary: This exchange of ideas has been examined in a number of books and articles, especially during the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than being an influence study that assesses the particularly existential qualities of postwar American literature, this dissertation approaches the reception of existentialism as a historical phenomenon, seeking to determine how the literature manifests the era in which it was written. It considers the prewar French response to American culture, as well as the postwar reception of existentialism in the United States, examining at length the work of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, and John Updike. To address the pervasive questions of the Cold War era, these authors turned not only to the work of twentieth-century French intellectuals propelled to popularity by their association with the Resistance, but also to the nineteenth-century critiques of rationalism undertaken by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Wright, Mailer, and Updike adapt existentialism for different purposes, but they share a common interest in examining the motives for human behavior, especially those underlying cruelty and violence, by reconsidering the nature of the human condition.