Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction

by Philip M. Weinstein

Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to "unknowing" by addressing the work of three supreme experimental Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism. Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of "coming to know"―the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices―postmodern and postcolonial―that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison.

Genres: Literary Criticism

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2005

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is as book that I read closely, including the 40+ Notes pages. At the end of it, I realized that I had read what to the author - Philip Weinstein - was his lifetime of scholarship, on the differences between - and transition from/to - realism to modernism. By using canonical literary texts by authors including Proust, Kafka, and Faulkner, the author shows the birth of a genre of scholarship - modernism - in a way that I could understand. I learned from this the importance of "events" in novels and what they mean for learning. A great work, that also considers some examples of postmodernism - and contrasts this genre with modernism. Occasionally you realize that you have read something very special (as I did with Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet) and the conclusion is accompanied by emotion. The same feeling was generated here, for this work of literary analysis and criticism. Thank you Philip!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended for me by a professor who is a reader on my master's thesis. At first I was skeptical- really, another critical tome, as I'm scurrying to get a hold on my own scribbling and putting everything together? I'm good with the face to face conversation but on paper it's a different story- my poor prose is all alone, on its own, with nothing but an invisible interlocutor to parse meaning and significance. It's scary, it's graphophobia, it's fear and cowardice and general writerliness writ large on the widescreen doom of scholarly academia.

Can't get away with much lyricism, it's got to fit a preordained jargon-and-theory suitcoat (straightjacket?) in oder to pass through customs when all it wants to do is run free all antidiluvian and fresh-pitted. not for nothing did Nietzsche insist on "good air! good air!" for his dangerous, calamitous, writhing paradoxes and seer's blues which told the 19th Century it was time to look its dark, anguished, denial-riddled self in the deep, dark truthful mirror and then, ever so slightly, tilted that mirror till it was flat and the void opened on the other side....

But I'm actually really loving this book. I appreciate the personal voice when the dude has to fret about tenure and conferences and MLA and whatever. I'll fill that blank space up later.
The writing isn't bad, either: punchy, precise, almost staccato at times, able to keep some winding discourse together without overcrowding the text or the mind of the reader too much. I mean if you're reading a book like this you've got to presuppose at least a passing familiarity with people like, say, Kant and Kafka and Faulkner and Proust. At least be conversational, as am merely with the first and last in the list. I can claim a bit more of a grip with the middle two fellows, but that's not completely necessary, I think, to be able to appreciate the criticism that is offered.

I'd like to quote directly from the text and limn the outline of the argument a little bit but I just pulled a rather productive all-nighter, as is my wont, and would rather just check back in with whoever is reading this (I love you! Seriously!) when I'm finished and I can let Weinstein shine through in all his persnickety glory.

***

Officially Finished!

(More detailed stuff to follow once I'm through with my project)