Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook 2008 is devoted entirely to Kierkegaard's early two-part work Either/Or (1843) that made the young Danish theologian, philosopher and man of letter famous virtually overnight, and the reception and effects of which have been linked with his name world-wide up to the present day. Either/Or rightly appears as an overwhelming study heralding the present age of the 20th/21st centuries. Section 1 contains the collected papers from the international research seminar of the Kierkegaard Research Centre held in Copenhagen in August 2007. Section 2 contains studies on the history of the work's reception, in this case coveringa wide field (from Scandinavia to China), which once again bear impressive testimony to the stature and effect of Kierkegaard's early work: Either/Or -Literature in its global effect.
Kierkegaard left the task of discovering the meaning of his works to the reader, because "the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted". Scholars have interpreted Kierkegaard variously as an existentialist, neo-orthodoxist, postmodernist, humanist, and individualist.
Crossing the boundaries of philosophy, theology, psychology, and literature, he is an influential figure in contemporary thought.... Show more