 
|
The Mind of the Novel: Reflexive Fiction and the IneffableAuthor: Bruce F. Kawin Scholarly Series October 2006 375 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-462-2 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $23.96 
|
Book Description
From Moby-Dick to The Unnamable, from A Tale of a Tub to The Book of Questions, Bruce Kawin explores the nature of self-conscious fiction and compares its structure to that of human consciousness. Focusing on texts that confront their own limits by trying to name the unnamable, the ineffable self, Kawin draws on methods from literary criticism to systems theory to explain a variety of first-person works that "dance around the ungraspable subject."
Many first-person texts—including those of Melville, Stein, Proust, Faulkner, Lessing, and Beckett—involve a hierarchy of narrators or a system of displaced viewpoints, underneath which may lie one ideal voice: a mind of the novel. Contemporary fiction, he shows, is not a literature of exhaustion but a confrontation by the author, text, and reader of the limits of awareness.
About the Author
|
Bruce Kawin is Professor of English and Film at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Born in Los Angeles in 1945, he earned a B.A. in English from Columbia, an M.F.A. in creative writing and filmmaking from Cornell, and a Ph.D. in modern literature and film, also from Cornell. He has written three books of narrative theory, three books on Faulkner, and two textbooks. He is also a poet and screenwriter. |
Praise
"It is positively readable throughout . . . The Mind of the Novel is a truly ingenious and compelling endeavor."—American Book Review"Ambitious, far-ranging . . . Strongly recommended."—Choice