The art of being : poetics of the novel and existentialist philosophy / Yi-Ping Ong.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ong, Yi-Ping, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature--Philosophy.

Literature--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Literature.

Fiction--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Existentialism.

Existentialism in literature.

Literature--Theory, etc.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

298 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2018.

Summary:

The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existential Philosophy offers an account of the poetics of the realist novel, based on how the novel reorients philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir not only read novels and use novelistic techniques of representation in their work, but also discover a radically new way of thinking about the relation between the form of the novel and the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and world. Drawing upon a rich archive of existentialists writing on the novel, Ong argues that for these thinkers the poetics of the novel in its classic phase - the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel - discloses the conditions for thinking about the meaning of existence. Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of the novels of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, this study reveals how the novel engages with philosophically rich notions of freedom, world, and the unfinished character of human life in its very form.-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Prologue: The existence of the novel in Nabokov's diagram

Introduction: The point of view of existence

Towards an existentialist poetics of the novel

The character of self-consciousness: representing freedom in the novel of marriage

Detotalized totality: situation, world, and being-in-the-novel

The novel and the unfinished work of art

Conclusion: The novel and philosophy.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780674983656

0674983653

OCLC:

1031408697