Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei is Professor and Kurrelmeyer Chair in German and Professor in Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. She is author of The Life of Imagination (Columbia University Press, 2018); Exotic Spaces in German Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2011); The Ecstatic Quotidian (Penn State University Press, 2007); Heidegger, Hoelderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language (Fordham University Press, 2004); and a book of poetry, After the Palace Burns (Zoo Press, 2003) which won The Paris Review Prize. She is the author of Imagination: A Very Short Introduction, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
In this deceptively easy to read book, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei packs three treatises in one: a smart introduction to continental philosophy, a brisk guide for living well and not dying stupid in an age of selfie-narcissism, and a new bridge between European and American culture linking Sartre with Kerouac, Rilke with Frost, de Beauvoir with Wright, Camus with Ellison, Heidegger with Du Bois, all asking the key question 'Why am I here?' The answer? You'll find it yourself in these pages. -- Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania, American Academy of Arts and Sciences On Being and Becoming is a timely book, as existentialism is an evocative response to the deep crises challenging our mortal and vulnerable existence. This book explores the existentialist answer to create our own meaning through our individual choices, not just in solitude but in engaged action seeking to transform the social world. The broad existential movement is sympathetically and accurately portrayed by Gosetti-Ferencei. This book is richly packed with insights and fluidly written for a general audience. It is not just a work of academic philosophy--discussing, among others, Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Frantz Fanon--but it also documents the influence of existentialism on African-American thinkers, such as W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright. -- Dermot Moran, Boston College Digestible summaries and ideas for practical application make this guide accessible to any philosophically minded reader. Even those well versed in existentialist thought will walk away from this with a new appreciation for the philosophy. --Publishers Weekly