Cornell University Press
The Novel Experience
About this book
The Novel Experience introduces new approaches to the study of narrative fiction, for scholars, critics, teachers, and readers. At the heart of this concise book is a conception of experience that is influenced by the musings of third-century Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna on the fictionality of truth and the emptiness of reality. Combining this insight with Nietzsche's method of intellectual genealogy and William James's transformation of emotion into "pure experience," Helmut Müller-Sievers proposes a way to talk about the experience of reading a novel that suspends the rush to judgment and ever-new "turn" in modes of interpretation. In its meditative corporeality, it is also beyond the grasp of any AI.
For Müller-Sievers, every experience is novel and every novel is an experience. He explicates this parallelism through philosophical works that privilege experience over knowledge (without denying the importance of understanding). Interspersing analyses of Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and James with personal essays about the lived experience of reading works like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O, The Novel Experience shows that reading about experiences in novels has a transformative effect on the reader's understanding of what it is to experience. Teachers and readers should attend to these changes, acknowledging their singularity while creating a community within which they can abide.
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Preface
ix -
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Reading Experience I: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
1 -
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Introduction
5 -
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Chapter 1 / Experience from Aristotle to Hegel
12 -
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Chapter 2 / The Liberation of Experience: Nāgārjuna
29 -
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Reading Experience II: Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Corner That Held Them
44 -
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Chapter 3 / The Genealogy of Experience: Nietzsche
47 -
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Chapter 4 / The Microphysics of Experience: William James
62 -
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Chapter 5 / The Reading of Experience
80 -
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Reading Experience III: Hélène Cixous, 1938, nuits
93 -
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Chapter 6 / The Experience of Reading
97 -
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Reading Experience IV: Heinrich von Kleist, Die Marquise von O . . .
111 -
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Chapter 7 / Reading Experiences
114 -
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Coda: Singularity, University, Experience
125 -
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Acknowledgments
133
