Title: The subject as action : transformation and totality in narrative aesthetics /
Authors: Singer, Alan, 1948-
Publisher: University of Michigan Press,
Year: 1993
Subjects: Narration (Rhetoric); Literature Aesthetics; Fiction; Subject (Philosophy)
Abstract: In The Subject as Action: Transformation and Totality in Narrative Aesthetics, Alan Singer posits "narrative aesthetics" as a crucial link between post Enlightenment philosophical skepticism about human subjectivity and literary-theoretical skepticism about the autonomy of the text or artwork. Observing a vital complementarity between the narrative and the aesthetic (two realms often alienated from each other), Singer argues for the relevance of narrative logic to the critique of post-Cartesian subjectivity. Reciprocally, he demonstrates the relevance of rational norms of human agency to the study of narrative art. On one hand, Singer wants to salvage the critique of the subject from the metaphysical abstraction of idealist philosophies. On the other hand, he wants to save literary narrative from the ahistoricism and apoliticism to which it is often consigned.^
Contents: Introduction: Prospect for a Narrative Aesthetics -- Ch. 1. The Methods of Form -- Ch. 2. The Totality of Desire: Toward a Historical Formalism -- Ch. 3. The Dis-Position of the Subject: Agency and Form in the Ideology of the Novel -- Ch. 4. The Voice of History / The Subject of the Novel -- Ch. 5. The Burden of Thematics: Transformation and Totality in Blanchot's Recit -- Ch. 6. The Figuration of Contingency: The Subject beyond Irony -- Ch. 7. Determining the Aesthetic: Beauty Beholds the I -- Ch. 8. Thinking Peripeteia / Peripetic Thinking.