Challenge of Bewilderment : Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford

Armstrong, Paul B.

ISBN 10: 1501722719 / ISBN 13: 9781501722714

Editore: Cornell University Press, 2018

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Challenge of Bewilderment : Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford
• Editore: Cornell University Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2018
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1501722719
• ISBN 13: 9781501722714
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Condizione: As New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

The Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away from its traditional concern with realistic representation and toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic experience of "bewilderment," an experience that challenges the reader’s very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more certainty or stability than an interpretative construct.

Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade’s End by Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the novelists’ attitudes toward the process of knowing inform experiments with representation, through which they thematize the relation between the understanding of a fictional world and everyday habits of perception. Finally, he considers how these experiments with the strategies of narration produce a heightened awareness of the process of interpretation.

Informazioni sull?autore

Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form, also from Cornell University Press, and of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, The Phenomenology of Henry James, and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation.