Open Secrets: The Literature Of Uncounted Experience

by Francois, Anne-Lise

• ISBN13: 9780804752893
• ISBN10: 0804752893
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-04
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Open Secretsidentifies an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action in Mme de Lafayette'sLa Princesse de Cleves(1678), Jane Austen'sMansfield 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 ofOpen Secretsis 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.

Author Biography

Anne-Lise François is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Preface	p. xv
Toward a Theory of Recessive Action	p. 1
L'aveu sans suite: Love's Open Secret in Lafayette's	p. 66
Lying Lightly: Lyric Inconsequence in Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Hardy	p. 129
Fanny's "Labour of Privacy" and the Accommodation of Virtue in Austen's	p. 218
Selected Bibliography	p. 269
Index	p. 283
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