Karen Blixen’s ‘Carnival’ in the Light of Søren Kierkegaard” has been published in the journal Scandinavica (2:2011), the second “‘Ehrengard,’ Kierkegaard, and the Secret Note” has been accepted by the journal Scandinavian Studies and is scheduled to appear in the winter 2013 issue and the third “Karen Blixen’s ‘The Poet’ and Søren Kierkegaard’s Gjentagelsen” has been submitted to the European Journal of Scandinavian Studies but has not yet been peer reviewed. At the time of writing the first article “Flappers and Macabre Dandies. This means that it consists of three articles and a background section. This thesis falls into the category of an article Ph.D. Hence, on my interpretation, the knight of faith does not need to adopt two contradictory attitudes at the same time (or constantly to "annul" one of them), but must rather practice a form of spiritual discipline in many ways analogous to the aesthete's endeavour to become a "poet of possibility." I will show that faith's alleged paradoxicality is only apparent and that the element of resignation that constitutes an aspect of it actually bears some striking similarities to what the aesthete has in mind when he speaks, in Either/Or, of throwing hope overboard in order to make possible a truly artistic way of life. But this is a confused way of thinking about faith. The problem with such a reading is that it leads to paradox: It seems to require attributing to the "knight of faith" two inconsistent belief-attitudes simultaneously-on the one hand, the willingness to resign one's heart's desires (infinite resignation) and, on the other, the conviction that one will somehow receive back what one has resigned. Most commentators follow Kierkegaard's pseudonymous author in claiming that progression to faith is a "linear" process that requires infinite resignation as a first step. One of the most intractable issues in Kierkegaard scholarship continues to be the question of what one is to make of the relation between infinite resignation and faith in Fear and Trembling. First, I place fairytale between poetry and philosophy second, I present Stages on Life’s Way as a mutilated fairytale and «totality of ruins» and third, I explore the motifs of the mirror, the lake, and the forest that are given in Taciturnus’ Fremlysning." I will show how and why Kierkegaard inserts the fairytale into his writings, which contains aesthetic, ethical and religious value, looking specifically at Taciturnus’ preface or what he calls a Fremlysning to Quidam’s dairy in Stages in Life’s Way. Fairytale is our first introduction into psychology and hermeneutics as children and allows our imagination to find a natural home it is also a story with a moral and it has the capacity for spiritual awakening and therapy. Published in Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, 3-4, 2013, pp.945-961 "Kierkegaard is a thinker who appropriates and weaves fairytale into his writings, as a way to think in images when logical argument fails, as a form of spiritual guidance that predates Christianity, and as a perfect example of parabolic or indirect communication that invites the reader to interpret what is being presented in the text in order to think for him/herself and awaken the imagination. In the end, Pinkie as the embodiment of non-existing individual with his melancholy, anxiety, and despair progresses from purely destructive aesthetic categories of sensuousness to alleviating reflection which, in the end, enables him to make a ‘leap of faith’ that will carry him to a more elevated existence type.
Greene figuratively annuls this life-project by clearly demarcating it from a ‘strange’ operation of God’s will. His distorted view of religion and strong imagination of physical hell creates a cataclysmic force that eradicates himself though he desperately seeks for a pristine experience of his selfhood.
Yet, this experimentation fails due to Pinkie’s living in absolute proximity to good and evil and his latent desire to experience them at the same time. As such, with its plots and themes, Brighton Rock experiments with the capacity of such an aesthetic life to form an authentic selfhood through the main character Pinkie Brown. Being the first phase in Kierkegaard’s three-fold existential ladder (theory of stages) into the fully authentic identity, the aesthetic stage carries in itself the seeds of a fulfilled selfhood. This study argues that the anti-hero Pinkie in Graham Greene’s first overtly religious novel Brighton Rock (1938) echoes Danish existentialist Kierkegaard’s aesthetic way of life, devoid of ideal and courage.
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