The Narrative Shape of Truth

Ilya Kliger

Published by Penn State University Press 2011

The Narrative Shape of Truth

Veridiction in Modern European Literature

Ilya Kliger

In the series Literature and Philosophy

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271078168

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author information

KligerIlya:

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

Reviews

“In this investigation of the ‘veridictory mutation’ in the modern European novel Ilya Kliger positions the genre’s rise amidst a broader shift in European thought (moving from Kant to Hegel) towards a conception of truth as embodied in a mediating and productive temporality. . . . Kliger’s compelling account of truth and narrative in the realist novel offers rich insights into the relationship between modernity’s shifting perceptions of time and truth, and the depictive power of the novel.”
—Mark Pettus, Modern Language Review

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Note on Transliteration Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: The Veridictory Mutation of the Novel Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Precipitant Knowledge in Balzac Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
2. The Whole and the Untrue: Stendhal’s Fragile Veridiction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
3. Enigma and Emplotment in Dostoevsky Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	114
4. Tolstoy’s Plotlines and Truth Shapes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Conclusion: Enduring the Schema in Modernist Time Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	207
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243

Language: English
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 256

eBook

Published: August 25, 2021
ISBN: 9780271078168