The Art of Being

Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy

Yi-Ping Ong

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780674983656
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674916104
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

The Art of Being is a powerful account of how the literary form of the novel reorients philosophy toward the meaning of existence. Yi-Ping Ong shows that for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir, the form of the novel in its classic phase yields the conditions for reconceptualizing the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. Their discovery gives rise to a radically new poetics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel.

For the existentialists, a paradox lies at the heart of the novel. As a work of art, the novel exists as a given totality. At the same time, the capacity of the novel to compel belief in the free and independent existence of its characters depends on the absence of any perspective from which their lives may be viewed as a consummated whole. At stake in the poetics of the novel are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible. Ong's reframing of foundational debates in novel theory takes us beyond old dichotomies of mind and world, interiority and totality, and form and mimesis. It illuminates existential dimensions of novelistic realism overlooked by empirical and sociological approaches.

Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, The Art of Being reveals how the novel engages in its very form with philosophically rich notions of self-knowledge, freedom, authority, world, and the unfinished character of human life.

Index

• absorption: in novel theory, 7, 247n15; readerly, 11, 58, 74, 158–159, 162; of self, 56, 126
• Adorno, Theodor, 236, 283n5
• aesthetic stage of life, 67, 105–107, 125–26; in Middlemarch, 105; in The Portrait of a Lady, 119–122, 143. See also ethical stage of life
• agency: in Anna Karenina, 12; of the artist, 222; of the author, 23, 37, 41, 218; as embedded in the world, 163, 164, 166; fiction of characterological, 22, 74, 91–93, 101–102; of the reader, 153; role of in self-knowledge, 31, 104; and situation, 184–187
• Andersen, Hans Christian, 49–50, 72–73; critical reception of, 50, 72, 249n2; Kierkegaard on, 18–20, 54–56, 58–64, 73, 256n18, 257n24
• Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 98, 194; Anna Karenina as character in, 5, 16–17; Anna Karenina as reader in, 3–5, 7–13, 16–17, 246n7; consciousness as free will in, 14–15; deliberative reflection in, 3, 4, 9–10, 12, 15; distraction from novel-reading in, 7–8; ethics in, 3, 14–15; imaginative reflection in, 4–5, 9–13, 17; Nabokov’s diagram of, 1–3; novel-reading in, 3–12, 116–117, 246n7; novel that Anna Karenina reads in, 1–3, 5, 8, 11, 245n4; readerly subjectivity in, 4, 9–10, 16–17; self-estrangement in, 15–17; trains in, 1–2, 7–8, 16–17; woman reader in, 3
• Armstrong, Nancy, 24, 27, 253–254n61
• Auerbach, Erich: and existentialist philosophy, 240–242, 284n12; Mimesis, 165, 167, 188–190, 240–242; “Über die ernste Nachahmung des Alltäglichen” (“On the Serious Representation of the Everyday”), 239–242
• Austen, Jane: critical reception of, 172, 206, 212, 279n39; novel of marriage and, 106–107, 113, 184; Mansfield Park, 106; Northanger Abbey, 106; Sense and Sensibility, 98, 104, 113. See also Emma; Pride and Prejudice
• author: aesthetically consummates lives of characters, 21–23, 40, 60–61, 69–70, 94–95, 249n7...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: The Existence of the Novel in Nabokov’s Diagram
• Introduction: The Point of View of Existence
• One: Toward an Existentialist Poetics of the Novel
• Two: The Character of Self-Consciousness: Representing Freedom in the Novel of Marriage
• Three: Detotalized Totality: Situation, World, and Being-in-the-Novel
• Four: The Novel and the Unfinished Work of Art
• Conclusion: The Novel and Philosophy
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index