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NATANSON, Maurice. The Erotic Bird: Phenomenoloqy in Literature. Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press, 1998. xvi + 169 pp. Cloth, $35.00-In this last work of his life, Natanson uses Arthur C. Danto's essay, "Philosophy as/and/of Literature," to differentiate philosophy from literature without separating them definitively from one another, In this way Natanson is able to account effectively for phenomena within literature in a manner opposed to recent literary theories that ignore how phenomena appear within works, and he devotes a great deal of work to his task. Natanson's approach differs from those of both Heidegger and Husserl by taking up a phenomenology of existence, of lived experience (though interestingly, sometimes not of "living individuals") seen through the literary work of writers like Henry James, Tennessee Williams, and Wallace Stevens. He likewise illustrates his point through a thorough study of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Kafka's The Metamorphosis.
Judith Butler's foreward applauds Natanson for his ability to explain phenomenology without presupposing prior knowledge of the various phenomenologists. She briefly describes schools of phenomenology and allies Natanson with phenomenology in its transcendental and social forms" (p. xiv).
In his first chapter Natanson discusses, with dissatisfaction and perhaps too briefly, how scholars have...