RT Article
T1 The Little Lower Layer: Anxiety and the Courage to be in Moby-Dick
JF Harvard theological review
VO 81
IS 1
SP 97
OP 116
A1 Matteson, John T.
LA English
PB Cambridge Univ. Press
YR 1988
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1784648426
AB In his foundational work on the problems of anxiety and self-affirmation, The Courage to Be, Paul Tillich refers to the twentieth century as an age of anxiety. He describes the century as an era in which humankind has become deeply and disturbingly aware of the threats of meaninglessness and spiritual nonbeing. This anxiety, Tillich asserts, has become a central theme for modern artists and writers, whose works have frequently depicted humankind and society as teetering on the brink of an ontological and spiritual abyss. As Tillich was aware, however, the concept of anxiety did not magically appear in literature in the year 1900. Although Tillich considers the anxiety of meaninglessness to be paramount in the present day, he gives extensive treatment to other anxieties (for example, the anxieties of guilt and death) that deeply concerned writers in earlier times. Tillich mentions T. S. Eliot, Camus, and Sartre, but he also hails Flaubert and Dostoyevsky as explorers of the “deserts and jungles of the human soul.” Another nineteenth-century novelist, who should not have passed without notice, escaped Tillich's attention: Herman Melville.
DO 10.1017/S0017816000009974