The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel

Eros, Failure, and the Quarrel with Philosophy

Tom Ribitzky

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9798216267904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The Seduction of Pessimism in the Novel: Eros, Futility, and the Quarrel with Philosophy explores the novel as a response to the Platonic myth that narrates the rift at the core of our being. Eros is supposedly the consolation for this rift, but the history of the novel documents its expression as one of frustrated desires, neuroses, anxieties, and cosmic doom. As if repeating the trauma from that original split in Plato—a split that also divides philosophy from literature—the novel treats eros as a site of loss and grief, from the medieval romances to Goethe, Emily Brontë, Proust, Mann, Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Nabokov. The pessimism that emerges from this eros, tells us something fundamental about who we are, something that only the novel can say. At a time when both education and leisure are increasingly ignoring the novel's imperative to sit with ambiguity, complexity, and contingency, and as we are hurtling toward a bleak future of climate catastrophe and political instability, the novel is one of the last bastions of humanity even as it is quickly being eroded.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Genre of Failure
• Chapter 2: Kicking and Screaming: Pessimism Between Etiology, Etymology, and Entomology
• Chapter 3: Albertine’s Absence
• Chapter 4: Failed Consolations in Plato’s Shadow: Boethius, Medieval Romance, and Goethe
• Chapter 5: From a Failed Theory of the Novel to a Novel of Failed Theories: Mann’s Response to Boccaccio, Schlegel, and Lukács
• Chapter 6: The Criminality and Illegitimacy of the Novel
• Chapter 7: Landscapes, Laughter, and Suicide
• Chapter 8: Constellations and Consternations
• Chapter 9: “A Globed Compacted Thing”: Woolf’s Cosmogony of Love and the Paradox of Failure in To the Lighthouse
• Chapter 10: Cosmic Pessimism in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: D. H. Lawrence’s Tristan Legend for the Twentieth Century
• Chapter 11: “A Last Mirage of Wonder and Hopelessness”: Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” as a Shadow Text of Nabokov’s Lolita
• Chapter 12: Kierkegaard’s Kiss: A Contribution to a Theory of the Novel
• Chapter 13: In Search of Lost Being: Heidegger’s Novelistic Quest
• Chapter 14: Seduction Against Production: The Novel as a Tool of Pedagogy in a World Doomed to Neoliberal Optimism
• Concluding Unscientific Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author