Existentialism and Baseball

Paul Auster has been described as one the most European of American writers. A best-selling author in the U.S., he has become a cultural icon in France. Considering that his novels are almost exclusively set in America and regularly feature intertextual references to American Renaissance literature and Transcendentalism, what specifically is it about Austers work that allows us to qualify it as European or, more precisely, French? This book provides an answer by tracing the influence of French thought on the recurring themes of Paul Austers novels. Its principal focus is Austers narrativization of philosophical questions and concepts inherited from the 20th-century French writers and thinkers he has translated. Tom Theobald illustrates how the key themes of Paul Austers work, such as chance, freedom, responsibility and the relationship between self and other, find their intellectual roots in Surrealism, in the existential phenomenology of Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as in the literary philosophy of Maurice Blanchot. Theobalds study is of particular interest to Auster scholars as well as anyone interested in the complex relationship between philosophy and literature.