Research Catalog

Title

Seven Modes of Uncertainty / C. Namwali Serpell.

Author

Serpell, Namwali, 1980-

Publication

Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2014.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 393 pages; 25 cm

Summary

"What is the relationship between literature's capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature's ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson's groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience. Taking as case studies experimental novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Elliot Perlman, Tom McCarthy, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Serpell suggests that literary uncertainty emerges from the reader's shifting responses to structures of conflicting information"--Jacket.

Alternative Title

• 7 Modes of Uncertainty
• 7 modes of uncertainty

Subject

• Fiction > History and criticism
• Literature and morals
• Ethics in literature
• Literature > Aesthetics
• Uncertainty in literature
• Ambiguity in literature
• Experimental fiction > History and criticism

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Mutual exclusion. Oscillation : Thomas Pynchon, The crying of lot 49 (1966) ; Enfolding : rereading Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) -- Multiplicity. Adjacency : Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) ; Accounting : interreading William Empson's Seven types of ambiguity (1930), Shirley Jackson's "Seven types of ambiguity" (1943), and Elliot Perlman's Seven types of ambiguity (2003) -- Repetition. Vacuity : Bret Easton Ellis, American psycho (1991) ; Synchronicity : metareading Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005) ; Conclusion : flippancy : Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely loud & incredibly close (2005).

ISBN

9780674729094 (alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2013032892

OCLC

• 859252937
• SCSB-11022958

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library