Unknowing by Philip Weinstein - 9780801489730

UnknowingThe Work of Modernist Fiction\nAuthor(s): Philip Weinstein\nFormat: Paperback\nPublisher: Cornell University Press, United States\nImprint: Cornell University Press\nISBN-13: 9780801489730, 978-0801489730\nSynopsis\nPhilip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to \""unknowing\"" by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: 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 .