Enten-eller

Diary of a Seducer records Johannes's discovery of a girl with the Shakespearean name Cordelia, whom he sets out to control. Intricately, meticulously, cunningly, the seduction proceeds. No detail is too small to escape Johannes. "She sits on the sofa by the tea table and I sit on a chair at her side. This position has an intimate quality and at the same time a detaching dignity." Less erotic than an intellectual depiction of seduction, Diary of a Seducer shows the casuist Kierkegaard in what he characterized as the aesthetic mode. A new introduction by Michael Dirda puts this influential novella into high relief.