Strange likeness : description and the modernist novel /
Zhang, Dora,
Strange likeness : description and the modernist novel / Dora Zhang. - Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020 - 246p. - Thinking literature .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction -- "That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool" -- Toward a Theory of Description -- James's Airs -- Proust and the Effects of Analogy -- Feeling with Woolf -- The Ends of Description.
"The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description-what Virginia Woolf called an "ugly, clumsy, incongruous tool." As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early twentieth-century writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations-social, formal, and experiential- between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. The book will enliven conversations around affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy"--
9780226722498 9780226722528
Fiction
Description (Rhetoric)
808.3 ZHA
Strange likeness : description and the modernist novel / Dora Zhang. - Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020 - 246p. - Thinking literature .
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction -- "That Ugly, That Clumsy, That Incongruous Tool" -- Toward a Theory of Description -- James's Airs -- Proust and the Effects of Analogy -- Feeling with Woolf -- The Ends of Description.
"The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description-what Virginia Woolf called an "ugly, clumsy, incongruous tool." As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the twentieth century. Dora Zhang argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early twentieth-century writers, centrally Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust. Description is the novelistic technique charged with establishing a common world, but in the early twentieth century, there was little agreement about how a common world could be known and represented. Zhang argues that the protagonists in her study responded by shifting description away from visualizing objects to revealing relations-social, formal, and experiential- between disparate phenomena. In addition to shedding new light on some of the best-known works of modernism, Zhang opens up new ways of thinking about description more broadly. She moves us beyond the classic binary of narrate-or-describe and reinvigorates our thinking about the novel. The book will enliven conversations around affect theory, philosophy and literature, and reading practices in the academy"--
9780226722498 9780226722528
Fiction
Description (Rhetoric)
808.3 ZHA