Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction Contributor(s): Weinstein, Philip (Author) |
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ISBN: 0801443709 ISBN-13: 9780801443701 Publisher: Cornell University Press OUR PRICE: $128.70 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: September 2005 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Literary Criticism | American - General - Literary Criticism | Modern - 20th Century - Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory |
Dewey: 809.391 |
LCCN: 2005016066 |
Physical Information: 0.88" H x 6" W x 9" (1.41 lbs) 320 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to unknowing by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism.Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of coming to know--the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices--postmodern and postcolonial--that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison. |
Contributor Bio(s): Weinstein, Philip: - Philip Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College. He is the author of What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison; Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns; and The Semantics of Desire: Changing Models of Identity from Dickens to Joyce. |