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Five Fictions in Search of Truth / Myra Jehlen.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2008]Copyright date: ©2008Edition: Course BookDescription: 1 online resourceContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780691136127
  • 9781400828913
Subject(s): Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- PROLOGUE. A Real Madeleine Is a Work of Art -- CHAPTER ONE. Salammbô: Three Rough Stones beneath a Rainy Sky -- CHAPTER TWO. The Sacred Fount: The Case of the Man Who Suddenly Grew Smart -- CHAPTER THREE. The Ambassadors: What He Saw Was Exactly the Right Thing -- CHAPTER FOUR. Lolita: A Beautiful, Banal, Eden-Red Apple -- CHAPTER FIVE. A Simple Heart: Félicité and the Holy Parrot -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index
Summary: Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbô, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass. In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for taking hold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological as they are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. The aesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments for exploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm the validity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, a beautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty. James and Nabokov wrote on the same assumption--that form and style were at once the origin and the confirmation of a work's truth. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Jehlen shows, moreover, that fiction's findings are not only about the world but immanent within it. Literature works concretely, through this form, that style, this image, that word, seeking a truth that is equally concrete. Writers write--and readers read--to discover an incarnate, secular knowledge, and in doing so they enact a basic concurrence between literature and science.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9781400828913

Frontmatter -- Contents -- PROLOGUE. A Real Madeleine Is a Work of Art -- CHAPTER ONE. Salammbô: Three Rough Stones beneath a Rainy Sky -- CHAPTER TWO. The Sacred Fount: The Case of the Man Who Suddenly Grew Smart -- CHAPTER THREE. The Ambassadors: What He Saw Was Exactly the Right Thing -- CHAPTER FOUR. Lolita: A Beautiful, Banal, Eden-Red Apple -- CHAPTER FIVE. A Simple Heart: Félicité and the Holy Parrot -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

Fiction, far from being the opposite of truth, is wholly bent on finding it out, and writing novels is a way to know the real world as objectively as possible. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Myra Jehlen develops this idea through readings of works by Flaubert, James, and Nabokov. She invokes Proust's famous search for lost memory as the exemplary literary process, which strives, whatever its materials, for a true knowledge. In Salammbô, Flaubert digs up Carthage; in The Ambassadors, James plumbs the examined life and touches at its limits; while in Lolita, Nabokov traces a search for truth that becomes a trespass. In these readings, form and style emerge as fiction's means for taking hold of reality, which is to say that they are as epistemological as they are aesthetic, each one emerging by way of the other. The aesthetic aspects of a literary work are just so many instruments for exploring a subject, and the beauty and pleasure of a work confirm the validity of its account of the world. For Flaubert, famously, a beautiful sentence was proven true by its beauty. James and Nabokov wrote on the same assumption--that form and style were at once the origin and the confirmation of a work's truth. In Five Fictions in Search of Truth, Jehlen shows, moreover, that fiction's findings are not only about the world but immanent within it. Literature works concretely, through this form, that style, this image, that word, seeking a truth that is equally concrete. Writers write--and readers read--to discover an incarnate, secular knowledge, and in doing so they enact a basic concurrence between literature and science.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jul 2019)