Ignorance

Literature and agnoiology

By: Andrew Bennett

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Hardcover | 1 September 2009

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272 Pages

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23.4 x 15.6 x 1.5

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Beginning with the idea that literature tends to be rejected by philosophy on account of its epistemological irresponsibility, Bennett argues that the dominant conception of literature since the Romantic period involves an often unacknowledged engagement with the experience of not knowing. Ignorance is part of the narrative and poetic force of literature and is an important aspect of its thematic focus: ignorance is what literary texts are about. But ignorance also characterises the condition, at some level, of both authorship and reading. From Wordsworth and Keats to George Eliot and Charles Dickens, from Henry James to Joseph Conrad, from Elizabeth Bowen to Philip Roth and Seamus Heaney, writers have been fascinated and compelled by the question of ignorance, induding their own; and the properly informed reader would be one who, at some level, doesn't know how to read. Bennett argues that there is a politics and ethics as well as a poetics of ignorance: literature's agnoiology, its acknowledgement of the limits of what we know both of ourselves and of others, engages with the possibility of democracy and the ethical, and allows us to begin to conceive of what it might mean to be human.

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"Reading ‘demands more ignorance than knowledge.'" --Maurice Blanchot

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Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction	p. 1
Ignorance and philosophy	p. 9
Literary ignorance	p. 33
To see as poets do: Romanticism, the sublime and poetic ignorance	p. 55
The opposite of epistemology: Keatsian nescience	p. 81
Our ignorance of others: Middlemarch and Great Expectations	p. 100
Joseph Conrad's blindness	p. 132
Children, death and the enigmatic signifier: Wordsworth and Bowen	p. 54
Monsters and trees: epistemelancholia in David Hume and Henry James	p. 176
American ignorance: Philip Roth's America trilogy	p. 202
The politics of authorial ignorance: contemporary poetry	p. 226
Index	p. 253
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Ignorance

Literature and agnoiology

At a Glance

Hardcover

Industry Reviews

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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