An edition of Skeptical Selves (1996)

Skeptical Selves

Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel

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Skeptical Selves
Elena Russo, Elena Russo
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Last edited by ImportBot
February 17, 2023 | History
An edition of Skeptical Selves (1996)

Skeptical Selves

Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel

  • 1 Want to read

This book examines three first-person novels that narrate spectacular failures of self-representation. In an innovative move, the author grounds these failures in the narrators' inability to move beyond Empiricist notions of correspondence between private, nonverbal experience and public expression, an inability that confines them to various forms of solipsism.

Russo contends that such Empiricist notions still inform contemporary French novels and criticism. She deftly shows that current forms of linguistic skepticism favored by Blanchot, Sartre, Barthes, and Derrida are in fact the very product of the Empiricist notion of truth these authors claim to have rejected. Instead, she argues for the social and contextual dimension of language and against the illusion of authenticity on which these critics still rely.

Her readings recast the debates surrounding postmodernism by placing them in a much-needed historical context.

Through a series of lively close readings of Prevost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne, Constant's Adolphe, and Des Forets's Le Bavard, Russo establishes the continuous legacy of Empiricism across three centuries.

Prevost pins his narrator's interpretive difficulties on an inability to know and categorize Oriental reality, Constant grounds his critique of language on the same ethical and political principles that underlie his liberalism, while Des Forets's extreme solipsism pitches him against the Sartrean notion of engagement.

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Cover of: Skeptical selves
Skeptical selves: empiricism and modernity in the French novel
1996, Stanford University Press
in English
Cover of: Skeptical Selves
Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel
1996, Stanford University Press
Hardcover

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Book Details


First Sentence

"Histoire d'une Grecque moderne, Adolphe, and Le Bavard: all three novels embody the idea that narrating the event and making it public modify the content of the self's experience."

The Physical Object

Format
Hardcover

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL9662780M
ISBN 10
0804724660
ISBN 13
9780804724661

Source records

Better World Books record

Excerpts

Histoire d'une Grecque moderne, Adolphe, and Le Bavard: all three novels embody the idea that narrating the event and making it public modify the content of the self's experience.
added anonymously.

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February 17, 2023 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
December 15, 2009 Edited by WorkBot link works
April 30, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from amazon.com record