The Narrative Shape of Truth - Veridiction in Modern European Literature

Its champions-and its detractors-have often understood the novel as the genre par excellence of truthlessness. The Narrative Shape of Truth counters this widely accepted view. It argues instead that the novel has found new, historically specific configurations of truth and narrative. The nineteenth-century novel, in particular, can be understood as responding to the emerging tendency to view truth as inseparable from, rather than opposed to, time. Ilya Kliger offers a nonreductive way of reading the histories of philosophy and the novel side by side. He identifies the crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative when, at the end of the eighteenth century, a new structural affiliation between truth and time emerged.
This book examines novels by four authors-Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy-as well as the writings of leading European intellectuals and philosophers. Kliger argues that the "realist" novel can be conceived as prompting us (and giving us the means) to think of truth differently, as immanent in a temporal shape rather than transcendent in a principle, a fact, or a higher order.

List of contents

"Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: The Veridictory Mutation of the Novel
1.Precipitant Knowledge in Balzac
2.The Whole and the Untrue: Stendhals Fragile Veridiction
3.Enigma and Emplotment in Dostoevsky
4.Tolstoys Plotlines and Truth Shapes
Conclusion: Enduring the Schema in Modernist Time
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Ilya Kliger is Assistant Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University.

Summary

Draws on philosophical and novelistic texts from the Western European and Russian canons to explore a crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative and present a nonreductive way of conjugating the histories of philosophy and the novel.

Product details

• Authors: Ilya Kliger, Ilya (Assistant Professor Kliger, Kliger Ilya
• Publisher: University Presses
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 15.04.2016
• EAN: 9780271050775
• ISBN: 978-0-271-05077-5
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 18 mm
• Weight: 544 g
• Illustrations: Illustrationen, nicht spezifiziert
• Series: Literature & Philosophy; Literature and Philosophy
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; PHILOSOPHY / Epistemology, HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century, HISTORY / Modern / 18th Century, LITERARY CRITICISM / European / French, Literature: history & criticism, Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge, Philosophy: epistemology and theory of knowledge, LITERARY CRITICISM / Russian & Soviet