Literature and the Taste of Knowledge [Hardcover]

A lively study of the forms of knowledge in literature, first published in 2005.What does literature know? This study offers a lively new look at this very ancient question and calls a large range of modern novels and poems to the witness stand. The writers discussed include Henry James, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys and many others. Wood argues that fiction in many of its forms both challenges what we think we know and provides its own often eerie and elusive varieties of knowledge.What does literature know? This study offers a lively new look at this very ancient question and calls a large range of modern novels and poems to the witness stand. The writers discussed include Henry James, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Jean Rhys and many others. Wood argues that fiction in many of its forms both challenges what we think we know and provides its own often eerie and elusive varieties of knowledge.What does literature know? Does it offer us knowledge of its own or does it only interrupt and question other forms of knowledge? This book answers and prolongs these questions through the close examination of individual works and the exploration of a broad array of examples. Chapters on Henry James, Kafka, and the form of the villanelle are interspersed with wider-ranging inquiries into forms of irony, indirection and the uses of fiction. Examples range from Auden to Proust and Rilke, and from Calvino to Jean Rhys and Yeats.Introduction: among the analogies; 1. What Henry knew; 2. After such knowledge; 3. Kafka and the Third Reich; 4. Seven types of obliquity; 5. Missing dates; 6. The fictionable world; Epilogue: the essays of our life.?These inspiring discussions offer productive readings of writers who enjoy winking wile playing with literary space. Highly recommended.?
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