Format:
246 Seiten ;
,
23 cm.
ISBN:
978-0-226-72252-8
,
978-0-226-72249-8
Series Statement:
Thinking literature
Content:
"The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description-what Virginia Woolf called an "ugly, clumsy, incongruous tool." As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early twentieth-century writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations-social, formal, and experiential- between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. The book will enliven conversations around affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy"--
Note:
Introduction -- "That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool" -- Toward a Theory of Description -- James's Airs -- Proust and the Effects of Analogy -- Feeling with Woolf -- The Ends of Description
Additional Edition:
Erscheint auch als Online-Ausgabe ISBN 978-0-226-72266-5
Language:
English
Subjects:
American Studies
,
Romance Studies
,
English Studies
Keywords:
1882-1941 Woolf, Virginia
;
1828-1911 James, Henry
;
1871-1922 Proust, Marcel
;
Roman
;
Erzähltechnik
;
Criticism, interpretation, etc
