The art of being : poetics of the novel and existentialist philosophy /
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...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge, Massachusetts :
Harvard University Press,
[2018]
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| 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. |
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| Physical Description: | 298 pages ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780674983656 0674983653 |