Best "existentialist" texts?

There can be no "best" existentialist text, because nothing has any intrinsic meaning. Some people may have opinions about texts, but these do not reflect an objective reality.

Here are some of my favorites -- keep in mind that some of these are not "texts," they are novels or plays or poems.

Jean-Paul Sartre- Being and Nothingness, The Wall, Dirty Hands, No Exit, Existentialism is a Humanism (lecture)

Albert Camus- The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula

Martin Heidegger- Being and Time, On the Essence of Truth

Friedrich Nietzsche- anything, really, but The Gay Science is probably the most existential of his writings

Soren Kierkegaard- Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Fear and Trembling, The Sickness Unto Death -- this is another you could read pretty much anything of... all of his works are good existentialist writings.

T.S. Eliot- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (poem)

Fyodor Dostoyevsky- Notes From Underground, The Brothers Karamazov

Franz Kafka- The Trial, The Castle

FatherJay said:

Friends,

Im currently looking into Existentialism and would like your opinions on the best texts that discuss this.

Thank you

Father Jay

Click to expand...

Hello,

Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" is perhaps the standard text. Much of what people typically attribute to Existentialism isn't really correct. Phenomenologists are not Existentialists. People writing in the 19th Century are not Existentialists regardless any emphasis on the subject. The movement proper basically has its impetus with Sartre based on his misreading of Heidegger.

FatherJay said:

Friends,

Im currently looking into Existentialism and would like your opinions on the best texts that discuss this.

Thank you

Father Jay

Click to expand...

nadrov said most of the major ones but maybe add waiting for godot by Becket and La Nausée if you want any more Sartre?

Also, films like wings of desire or paris texas by Wim Wenders, or Persona by Ingmar Bergan.

nadroj pwnd it.

Nothing left but existential psychology: Viktor Frankl -- Man's Search for Meaning, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy. Virtually anything by Rollo May -- especially The Discovery of Being.

You can also add Miguel de Unamuno to the philosophical existentialists; he's a lighter Kierkegaard.