Open Secrets The Literature of Uncounted Experience [Paperback]

Open Secretsidentifies an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action in Mme de Lafayette'sLa Princesse de Cl?ves(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. The dazzling analyses on display inOpen Secretsare so original and far-reaching that, taken together, they constitute something like a new paradigm for literary study. Attentive to the unattended and the inconspicuously significant, Francois teases out the real dynamics in one resonant example after another, in the lyric and the novel. An altogether singular achievement that will be reckoned with for years to come. Anne-Lise Fran?ois is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Open Secretsis a profoundly original and exquisitely written book, one of the most important publications in its field in many years. Anne-Lise Fran?ois develops here an idiom that can help us attend to the quiet mystery of literary experielH