By Gary Saul Morson
This far-ranging learn develops Morson’s inspiration of “prosaics,” which stresses the significance of normal occasions and the novel’s designated skill to painting them. Arguing that point is open and contingency genuine, Morson develops a “prosaics of method” displaying how a few masterpieces have came upon a substitute for constitution. His famous pseudonym Alicia Chudo, the inventor of “misanthropology,” explores the demanding philosophical content material of laughter, disgust, or even empathy. Northwestern University’s most well-liked professor, Morson attributes declining pupil curiosity in literature to present educating tools. He argues in desire of revealing how literature fosters empathy with humans not like ourselves. Ever playful, Morson explores the relation of video games to wit, which expresses the facility of the brain to overcome contingency within the social international.
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Additional resources for Prosaics and Other Provocations: Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel
Example text
In the countertraditional view, we live in a world where narrative is essential. To this tradition belong Darwin, Adam Smith, and Clausewitz; these three draw on earlier thinkers, from Aristotle and the casuists to Montaigne and numerous skeptics. The novel as a genre reflects a philosophical belief that the world requires narrative. It is essentially casuistical in its impulse; that is, it values particular cases irreducible to general laws. 5. I suspect we are at the beginning of a revival of narrativeness as a form of thought.
Wit as I analyze it expresses the adequacy of mind to any challenge the social world may present. It can sometimes achieve real profundity and demonstrate impressive courage. *** As this summary suggests, these essays return time and again to a set of problems. Each essay approaches contingency from a different angle, all deal in one way or another with presentness and open time, and empathy is considered over and over again. So is the strength or weakness of our models of human experience. And I return time and again to the nature, meaning, and value of novels.
De Rougement’s book reads like a gloss on the great prosaic novelists, by which I mean fiction writers who not only describe everyday details (as all realists do) but who also place the highest value on how those details are lived. The tradition includes Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Chekhov, novels like George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and the works of Barbara Pym. One might say that Anna Karenina dies from a lack of prosaics, from her attempt to base her life with Vronsky entirely on passion and the excitement of desire.