Abstract

The essay highlights Sterne’s influence on some very significant authors between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In particular, Marx and Nietzsche, Lukács and Jünger. In the background, there are Kant, Goethe and Hegel. The specific episode of Tristram Shandy under consideration, which forms the finale of Chapter v, also puts John Austin in the scene, because it contains an origina pronouncement – in some ways an anticipation – on the kind of linguistic statements Austin calls “performativeµ. One gets from it an anti-essentialist worldview, in which the common thread is the concept of humor