Open secrets : the literature of uncounted experience
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Open secrets : the literature of uncounted experience
（Meridian : crossing aesthetics / Werner Hamacher & David E. Wellbery, editors）
Stanford University Press, 2008
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at 2 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-282) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Open Secrets identifies an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action in Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves (1678), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), and poems by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy. The author argues that these works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular that of self-concealment and self-presentation. Declining the twin pressures of self-actualization and self-denial defining modernity's call to make good on one's talents, the subjects of the "literature of uncounted experience" do nothing so heroic as renounce ambitions of self-expression; they simply set aside the fantasy of the all-responsible subject. The originality of Open Secrets is thus to imagine the non-instrumental without casting it as a heavy ethical burden. Non-appropriation emerges not as what is difficult to do but as the path of least resistance. The book offers a valuable counterpoint to recent anti-Enlightenment revaluations of passivity that have made non-mastery and non-appropriation the fundamental task of the ethical subject.
Table of Contents
@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Preface iii @toc2:1 Toward a Theory of Recessive Action 000 2 L'aveu sans suite: Love's Open Secret in Lafayette's La Princesse de Cl'ves 000 3 Lying Lightly: Lyric Inconsequence in Wordsworth, Dickinson and Hardy 000 4 Fanny's "Labour of Privacy" and the Accommodation of Virtue in Austen's Mansfield Park 000 @toc4:Works Cited 000 Index 000
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