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Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: The Genre of Failure
Chapter Two: Kicking and Screaming: Pessimism Between Etymology and Entomology
Chapter Three: Albertine's Absence
Chapter Four: Failed Consolations in Plato's Shadow
Chapter Five: From a Failed Theory of the Novel to a Novel of Failed Theories
Chapter Six: The Criminality and Illegitimacy of the Novel
Chapter Seven: Consternations
Chapter Eight: Constellations
Chapter Nine: "A Globed Compacted Thing": Woolf's Cosmogony of Love and the Paradox of Failure in To the Lighthouse
Chapter Ten: Cosmic Pessimism in Lady Chatterley's Lover: D.H. Lawrence's Tristan Legend for the Twentieth Century
Chapter Eleven: "A Last Mirage of Wonder and Hopelessness": Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" as a Shadow Text of Nabokov's Lolita
Chapter Twelve: Kierkegaard's Kiss: A Contribution to a Theory of the Novel
Chapter Thirteen: In Search of Lost Being
Chapter Fourteen: Seduction Against Production: The Novel as a Tool of Pedagogy in a World Doomed to Neoliberal Optimism
Conclusion: Concluding Unscientific Postscript
Bibliography
About the Author
