Challenge of Bewilderment

B. Armstrong Paul

Description

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.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501722721
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

THe CHallege of Bewildermet

TÉ CHaLLENGE

OF bEWIlDERMeNt

Understanding and Representation

inJames, Conrad,. and Ford

Pà B. Armsrong

coe UnIveRsIty pRess

Thàcà ànd ondon

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/ Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Cornell University Press gratefully acknowledges a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that aided in bringing this book to publication.

Copyright © 1987 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

First published 1987 by Cornell University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Armstrong, Paul B., 1949– The challenge of bewilderment. Includes index. 1. English îction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Ford, Ford Madox, 1873–1939— Criticism and interpretation. 4. James, Henry, 1843–1916—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Mimesis in literature. 6. Reader-response criticism. I. Title. PR881 .A76 1987 823'.912'09 87-6683 ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-1949-2 (cloth) — ISBN-13: 978-1-5017-2271-4 (pbk.)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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