Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction
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What is at stake when a group of major modernist writers centers their fiction on unknowing? Decades of reflection about Western modernism reduce to the implications of this question. Modernist and unknowing in relation to what premodernist commitment to knowing? Modernist and unknowing in relation to what postmodern and postcolonial stances toward knowing? What began as microcosmic attention to certain compelling fictional effects among a handful of twentieth-century writers escalated, to my surprise, to a speculative, macrocosmic mapping of one genre of Western imagination: a sort of metahistory of the novel.
