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With a foreword by John N. Maclean, son of Norman Maclean The Writings of Norman Maclean: Seeking Truth amid Tragedy provides the first critical reassessment of this celebrated author's work in more than a decade. In his study, Timothy P. Schilling focuses on Maclean's attempt, in A River Runs through It and Other Stories and Young Men and Fire, to come to grips with the tragic side of human existence. From the 1938 death of his brother Paul to the 1949 deaths of thirteen firefighters in Montana's Mann Gulch wildfire, Maclean is driven by a desire to discover ultimate meaning—the truth—in the face of haunting tragedy. Through careful analysis of all of Maclean's published works, Schilling highlights the audaciousness of Maclean's quest to wrest free an answer from “the universe.” Ever open to scientific, literary, philosophical, and theological ways of viewing reality, Maclean found ambiguity, paradoxically, to be an essential tool for probing the truth. Beyond exploring Maclean's use of this tool, Schilling breaks new ground by considering Maclean's invocation of the Transcendentals in “A River Runs through It,” noting the sly homage Maclean pays to Izaak Walton, examining Maclean's often-neglected “Other Stories,” assessing Robert Redford's film adaptation of “A River Runs through It,” and providing the most thorough exploration of Young Men and Fire yet available. With this book, Schilling offers a current and complete analysis of Maclean—one of the most iconic figures in Western American literature.

Letters to James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller, and more by the famed monk, “one of the great American letter-writers of the century” (Kirkus Reviews).From 1948 until his death in 1968, Trappist monk and author of The Seven Storey Mountain Thomas Merton corresponded with writers around the world, sharing with them his concerns about war, violence and repression, racism and injustice, and all forms of human aggression.Addressed to Evelyn Waugh, Czeslaw Milosz, Boris Pasternak, James Baldwin, Walker Percy, Victoria Ocampo, Henry Miller, Jacques Maritain, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Carlos Williams, and others, this collection “reveals aspects of the monk that are seldom seen in literature apart from his letters” (Booklist).“Witty... confessional... insightful.” —The Boston Globe“Highly articulate and quietly inspirational.” —Publishers Weekly

The National Book Award–winning poet examines how the enduring narratives of fairy tales capture the essence of human nature.Fairy tales have remarkable power to touch the human spirit—and they are uniquely capable of retaining that power through time and across borders. Celebrated poet and bestselling author Robert Bly has spent decades investigating the origins and meanings of these deceptively simple stories.In More Than True, Bly looks at six tales that have long captivated him, from “The Six Swans” to “The Frog Prince.” Drawing on his own creative vision, and the work of a range of thinkers from Kirkegaard and Yeats to Freud and Jung, Bly brings new meaning and illumination to these timeless tales.Along with illustrations of each story, the book features some of Bly's unpublished poetry, which peppers his lyric prose and offers a look inside the mind of an American master of letters in the twilight of his singular career.

Este libro se centra en descubrir cómo el escritor Edgar Allan Poe creó y desarrolló su propio concepto de “verdad” en sus historias de ciencia ficción. Para ello, se analizan los diversos recursos, incluyendo elementos, temas y técnicas narrativas, que este empleó para lograr verosimilitud en sus ficciones. Así, la autora explora en profundidad las narraciones de ciencia ficción de Edgar A. Poe, principalmente sus cuentos / relatos cortos, y también busca explicar la significativa contribución de este autor estadounidense al surgimiento de este género literario, a pesar de su limitada conciencia al respecto. Puesto que dichas historias han sido escasamente estudiadas dentro del conjunto de la obra literaria de Poe, estas plantean desafíos significativos en términos de análisis, definición y categorización dentro de un género canónico, aspecto al que también se le otorga especial relevancia en este libro.

Love, Subjectivity, and Truth engages in a lively manner with the overlapping areas of philosophy and literature, philosophy of emotions, and existential thought. “Subjective truth,” a phrase used in Proust's novel In Search of Lost Time, is rich with existential connotations. It invokes Kierkegaard above all, but significantly Nietzsche as well, and other philosophers who thematize love, subjectivity, and truth. In Search of Lost Time is especially concerned about what we can know about others through love. Insofar as it conveys and analyzes experience, the novel is capable not only of exploring existential issues but also of doing something like phenomenology. What we know is shaped by our way of knowing, just as the properties of visible, colored objects are determined by the wavelengths of light our eyes can see. Nowhere does the subjective basis of our awareness appear so evident as it does when we view things through loving eyes. In Proust's novel we find skeptical views about love expressed again and again. However, we also note countercurrents, in which love is shown to provide a unique sort of insight. At those times, love seems to be a prerequisite of veridical apprehension. Love, Subjectivity, and Truth investigates this tension as it is played out in Proust's fiction.

Our nation's founding document, the Declaration of Independence, confidently declares,'These truths we hold to be self-evident'And yet, America today seems mired in a truth crisis. Postmodern relativism has cast doubt on the Enlightenment notion of shared, self-evident truths held by all; technologies have made the swift proliferation of untruths commonplace; political sensibilities have become so partisan as to tolerate public personalities who brazenly lie. Many Americans, Jews among them, are understandably concerned for the future of truth as we once knew it. With this book, These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness, the editors and HUC-JIR have demonstrated a commitment to full engagement in the contemporary moment as well as to our Jewish heritage as a repository of complex and deep truths. We have assembled an impressive list of contributors who address the subject of truth in Jewish tradition and in contemporary Jewish life from several important perspectives: biblical, talmudic, liturgical, scientific, philosophical, satirical, pluralistic, and poetic. The articles are meant to shore up faith and to serve as a bank of resources to orient readers to Judaism's rich, multi-faceted and morally edifying teachings about truth.

The goal of this book is to guide writers toward creating more authenticity in visual storytelling. One of the needs for art is the mirror, a reflection of human existence and what is glorious, tragic, wonderful, and funny about life. In an age of “post-truth,” where derivative and grotesquely bogus stories are abundant, globally networked, and digitally streamed, this book examines what it means to both artists and audiences when the mirror is consistently distorted, inaccurate, and biased. The book offers a guide for finding authenticity in fictional narrative, regardless of genre or form. The book is intended as a compass for writers to better understand and confront the truths they want to reveal through narrative stories and how to find legitimacy in the fictional characters and situations they create. One element that sets this book apart from others is the use of storyboarding to explain ideas. There are many books that teach fundamentals of writing and producing for the screen, promising the reader great success through formula. This book is a guide for writers in finding their unique creative voice. While the emphasis of this book is on creating scripts intended for production of moving image media, the guide can be adapted to the creativity of various types of storytellers working in a variety of media fields.

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe's C. Auguste Dupin to Robert Mueller, to establish an oblique history of the path from a world where not believing in truth was unthinkable to the present, where it is common to believe that objective truth is a remnant of a simpler, more naïve time. Examining detective stories both literary and popular including hard-boiled, postmodern, and twenty-first century novels, the book establishes that examining detective fiction allows for a unique view of this progression to post-truth since the detective's ultimate job is to take the reader from doubt to belief. David Riddle Watson shows that objectivity is intersubjectivity, arguing that the belief in multiple worlds is ultimately what sustains the illusion of relativism.

Platωn establishes the principle that literature should cut through the notion of an ideal truth rather than be used as a vehicle for subjective visions and aesthetic tropes by those claiming to be ‘artists.'To engage with this centrality of human consciousness means to integrate a single source of origin: a Platωnic'οὐσία.'Contemporary hermeneutics draw upon perceptions that the origin is elliptic in postmodern and continental philosophical trains of thought. Moreover, much obscurity arises from Platωn's own insistence on over-emphasis, and what some philosophers and philologists would consider ‘taut tautology'—which leaves vast amounts of passages in Pre-Socratic manuscripts and Platωnic dialogues open to speculation and subjectivity. Philosophical debates center on the incapability of pinpointing truth, the real, or some definitive and/or tangible self-referential core within an age of pluralism and uncertainty. For this reason, students and scholars in literary theory and postmodern philosophy can gain much from clarifying these ubiquitous areas.Through comparative constructs, the nature of the novel, its evolution over time and inclusion of postmodernist technologies, cyber-capitalism, and accompanying symbols, bring us to question the real and human exigency. Could it be that'unlimited experimentation,'a kind of'pataphysical atopos within and upon a text warrants an aesthetic surface that construes a morally heinous environment? Jean Baudrillard probes this concept by vivifying that a lack of substance—an'exponential instability'—is invariably transmuting into an altogether absent entity. Within this displacement, this book juxtaposes Platωnic exegesis of the real—the'οὐσία'—and Baudrillardian aporia into current modes of reality for a body politic in acceleration.

Die Kritik des Wahrheitsanspruchs zwischen Geschichte an sich (Ranke: „wie es eigentlich gewesen“) und Darstellung der Geschichte ist ein auch politisch umstrittenes Erbe der Aufklärung. Eine Geschichte dieser Kritik reicht vom Perspektivismus des 18. Jahrhunderts, der die subjektive Standortgebundenheit historischer Aussagen regelt, bis zum Positivismus des 19. Jahrhunderts, der für den Tatsachenglauben wissenschaftliche Objektivität beansprucht. An der Diskussion über das Verhältnis von Geschichte und Dichtung hatten die hier behandelten Autoren – Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe, Novalis, Kleist, Heine, Grillparzer und Fontane – einen maßgeblichen Anteil. Vor dem Hintergrund zeitgenössischer Historiker wie Chladenius, Gatterer, Schlözer, Heinrich Luden, B. G. Niebuhr, Ranke, Gervinus, Droysen, Mommsen, Treitschke und Scherer sowie der Philosophen Kant, Nietzsche und Dilthey haben sie zur kritischen Problematisierung historischer Wahrheitsfindung einen vor allem literarischen Beitrag geleistet, z. B. Lessings Nathan der Weise, Goethes Faust, Novalis'Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Kleists Der zerbrochne Krug, Grillparzers Der arme Spielmann, Fontanes Vor dem Sturm. Allen gemeinsam ist die schließlich existentielle Verunsicherung durch die zentrale Frage der Aufklärung, wie sie Kleist formuliert hat: „ob das, was wir Wahrheit nennen, wahrhaft Wahrheit ist, oder ob es uns nur so scheint“.

Multiple Narratives, Versions and Truth in the Contemporary Novel considers the shifting perception of truth in fiction. Nicholas Frangipane examines the narrative technique of telling multiple versions of the same sets of events, presenting both true and false versions of the events within a fictional work. This book looks closely at these “Reflexive Double Narratives” in order to understand the way many contemporary writers have attempted to work past postmodernism without forgetting its lessons. Frangipane explores how writers like Ian McEwan, Yann Martel and Alice Munro have departed from the radical experimentation of their predecessors and instead make sincere attempts to find ways that fictional writing can reveal enduring truths, and in so doing, redefine the meaning of “truth” itself and signal the emergence of post-postmodernism.

Contemporary theatre, like so much of contemporary life, is obsessed with the ways in which information is detected, packaged and circulated. Running through forms as diverse as neo-naturalistic playwriting, intimately immersive theatre, verbatim drama, intermedial performance, and musical theatre, a common thread can be observed: theatre-makers have moved away from assertions of what is true and focussed on questions about how truth is framed. Commentators in various disciplines, including education, fine art, journalism, medicine, cultural studies, and law, have identified a ‘forensic turn'in culture. The crucial role played by theatrical and performative techniques in fuelling this forensic turn has frequently been mentioned but never examined in detail. Political and poetic, Theatrical Performance and the Forensic Turn is the first account of the relationship between theatrical and forensic aesthetics.Exploring a rich variety of works that interrogate and resist the forensic turn, this is a must-read not only for scholars of theatre and performance but also of culture across the arts, sciences and social sciences.

Quelle force de vérité accorder à la poésie? Apparemment aucune selon Baudelaire. C'est pourtant lui qui assure le passage décisif vers une poésie qui remet en question ses fondements, son devenir, sa nécessité, une poésie qui exige d'être sans cesse perception à valeur existentielle. La réflexivité poétique qui s'exerce entre apparence et tréfonds de l'homme exacerbe le poétique et le menace. Où, quand, comment et vers quoi se joue le vrai du poème? Pourquoi cette oeuvre pose-t-elle les enjeux de la modernité? Se débattant contre tout Idéal absolu, la poétique baudelairienne désire la liberté incarnée et douloureuse de l'artiste, de l'humain.

Treue gilt ungebrochen als wichtigster ethischer Faktor und grundlegendes gesellschaftkonstituierendes Element des Mittelalters. Die vorliegende textsortenübergreifende Studie geht erstmals der Konzeptualisierung von Treue in deutschsprachigen Texten des Mittelalters auf breiter Materialbasis nach. Knapp 800 Belegstellen aus Prosa- und Verstexten aller Themenbereiche (Poesie, Religion, Geschichte, Recht u.a.m.) von den Anfängen volkssprachiger Schriftlichkeit bis um 1350 bilden die Grundlage. Die Auswertung und Analyse erfolgt konsequent lexembezogen und ausgehend von den Verwendungsweisen von mhd. ‚triuwe‘, ahd. ‚triuwa‘ und as. ‚treuwa‘ nebst der mit ‚un‘- präfigierten Formen. Hierfür werden die diskurslinguistische Mehr-Ebenen-Analyse und die Frame-Semantik auf die historische Textsituation angepasst und hinsichtlich der Handhabung und Visualisierung größerer Belegmengen erprobt. Die Studie versteht sich als Plädoyer für das Zusammengehen von sprachlichen und literaturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen, wenn es darum geht, historische Wissensbereiche zu erfassen und zu analysieren.

Conference on Christianity and Literature (CCL) Book of the Year - Literary CriticismThe good news of Jesus Christ is a subversive gospel, and following Jesus is a subversive act.These notions were embodied in the literary work of American author Flannery O'Connor, whose writing was deeply informed by both her Southern context and her Christian faith. In this Studies in Theology and the Arts volume, theologian Michael Bruner explores O'Connor's theological aesthetic and argues that she reveals what discipleship to Christ entails by subverting the traditional understandings of beauty, truth, and goodness through her fiction. In addition, Bruner challenges recent scholarship by exploring the little-known influence of Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a twentieth-century Roman Catholic theologian, on her work.Bruner's study thus serves as a guide for those who enjoy reading O'Connor and—even more so—those who, like O'Connor herself, follow the subversive path of the crucified and risen one.The Studies in Theology and the Arts series encourages Christians to thoughtfully engage with the relationship between their faith and artistic expression, with contributions from both theologians and artists on a range of artistic media including visual art, music, poetry, literature, film, and more.

Only Imagine offers a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known,'fictional truth'. The theory of fictional content Kathleen Stock argues for is known as'extreme intentionalism'; the idea that the fictional content of a particular work is equivalent to exactly what the author of the work intended the reader to imagine. Historically, this sort of view has been highly unpopular. Literary theorists and philosophers alike have poured scorn upon it. The first half of this book attempts to argue that it should in fact be taken very seriously as an adequate account of fictional truth: better, in fact, than many of its more popular rivals. The second half explores various explanatory benefits of extreme intentionalism for other issues in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. Namely, can fiction give us reliable knowledge? Why do we'resist'imagining certain fictions? What, in fact, is a fiction? And, how should the imagination be characterised?

This study contends that folly is of fundamental importance to the implicit philosophical vision of Shakespeare's drama. The discourse of folly's wordplay, jubilant ironies, and vertiginous paradoxes furnish Shakespeare with a way of understanding that lays bare the hypocrisies and absurdities of the serious world. Like Erasmus, More, and Montaigne before him, Shakespeare employs folly as a mode of understanding that does not arrogantly insist upon the veracity of its own claims – a fool's truth, after all, is spoken by a fool. Yet, as this study demonstrates, Shakespearean folly is not the sole preserve of professional jesters and garrulous clowns, for it is also apparent on a thematic, conceptual, and formal level in virtually all of his plays. Examining canonical histories, comedies, and tragedies, this study is the first to either contextualize Shakespearean folly within European humanist thought, or to argue that Shakespeare's philosophy of folly is part of a subterranean strand of Western philosophy, which itself reflects upon the folly of the wise. This strand runs from the philosopher-fool Socrates through to Montaigne and on to Nietzsche, but finds its most sustained expression in the Critical Theory of the mid to late twentieth-century, when the self-destructive potential latent in rationality became an historical reality. This book makes a substantial contribution to the fields of Shakespeare, Renaissance humanism, Critical Theory, and Literature and Philosophy. It illustrates, moreover, how rediscovering the philosophical potential of folly may enable us to resist the growing dominance of instrumental thought in the cultural sphere.

Serious Fiction explores the novels of J.M. Coetzee, in dialogue with key works of the European literary tradition and several contemporary masterworks of world literature, in order to flesh out an ethico-aesthetic ideal for the contemporary novel. «Serious» refers back to the Aristotelian definition of tragedy to revive a certain communal, political-ethical task of the artwork; «fiction,» also referring back to Aristotle and the subsequent poetic tradition, stresses the element of play in the artwork in contrast to the seriousness of the world of daily survival, business, and life. Following post-Enlightenment thinkers from Schiller and Arnold to Leavis and Auerbach, as well as more contemporary literary theorists, the argument maintains a delicate balance between seriousness as a sort moral criterion of literary assessment and playfulness as a necessary stage in the creation of any artwork, adding the formal and epistemological obligations of the realist novel as the dominant literary genre of the long nineteenth century. Coetzee is presented as a contemporary model of serious fiction writing, balancing elements of realism and play/imagination, tragedy and the prosaic, aesthetic semi-autonomy and ethical responsibility. Major works by Coetzee are discussed – Waiting for the Barbarian, Life & Times of Michael K., Disgrace, Diary of a Bad Year – as well as other of his works, fictional and non-fictional, along with important traditional and contemporary works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Kakfa, and Beckett as well as Imre Kertész, W.G. Sebald, Eimear McBride, Cormac McCarthy, Jiang Rong, and others.

Before the 1970s, there were only a few acclaimed biographical novels. But starting in the 1980s, there was a veritable explosion of this genre of fiction, leading to the publication of spectacular biographical novels about figures as varied as Abraham Lincoln, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and Marilyn Monroe, just to mention a notable few. This publication frenzy culminated in 1999 when two biographical novels (Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Russell Banks'Cloudsplitter) were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and Cunningham's novel won the award. In The American Biographical Novel, Michael Lackey charts the shifts in intellectual history that made the biographical novel acceptable to the literary establishment and popular with the general reading public. More specifically, Lackey clarifies the origin and evolution of this genre of fiction, specifies the kind of'truth'it communicates, provides a framework for identifying how this genre uniquely engages the political, and demonstrates how it gives readers new access to history.

A major question in studies of aesthetic expression is how we can understand and explain similarities and differences among different forms of representation. In the current volume, this question is addressed through the lens of make-believe theory, a philosophical theory broadly introduced by two seminal works – Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe and Gregory Currie's The Nature of Fiction, both published 1990. Since then, make-believe theory has become central in the philosphical discussion of representation. As a first of its kind, the current volume comprises 17 detailed studies of highly different forms of representation, such as novels, plays, TV-series, role games, computer games, lamentation poetry and memoirs. The collection contributes to establishing make-believe theory as a powerful theoretical tool for a wide array of studies traditionally falling under the humanities umbrella.

Im Zentrum der 2., korrigierten und überarbeiteten Auflage dieser Studie stehen die 1905 veröffentlichten Memoiren'Ein Fürst der Diebe'und'Gescheitert'des internationalen Hoteldiebs und Hochstaplers Georges Manolescu. Sie machten einen gewerbsmäßigen Verbrecher zum literarischen Helden. Unter Einbezug von Studien des Kriminologen Erich Wulffen wird das Spannungsfeld erhellt, in das diese Bücher trafen. Daneben standen sie auch in literarhistorischen Traditionslinien, vor allem des Schelmenromans, der Lügendichtung, der Autobiographie, der Gefangenenliteratur und der literarischen Darstellung von Verbrechen, wie sie Pitaval, Schiller und die Kriminalerzählungen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert vorgegeben hatten. Manolescu fand mehrere Nachfolger, wie etwa Wilhelm Voigt, der'Hauptmann von Köpenick', Harry Domela oder Ignatz Strassnoff. Abgeschlossen wird die Untersuchung mit einer Analyse des Typus des'edlen Verbrechers'.

With these lectures Foucault inaugurates his investigations of truth-telling in the ethical domain of practices of techniques of the self. How and why, he asks, does the government of men require those subject to power to be subjects who must tell the truth about themselves?

In this new collection of interviews, some of America's most prominent novelists identify the key intellectual developments that led to the rise of the contemporary biographical novel, discuss the kind of historical'truth'this novel communicates, indicate why this narrative form is superior to the traditional historical novel, and reflect on the ideas and characters central to their individual works. These interviews do more than just define an innovative genre of contemporary fiction. They provide a precise way of understanding the complicated relationship and pregnant tensions between contextualized thinking and historical representation, interdisciplinary studies and'truth'production, and fictional reality and factual constructions. By focusing on classical and contemporary debates regarding the nature of the historical novel, this volume charts the forces that gave birth to a new incarnation of this genre.

Die Frage der Wahrheit gehört zu den zentralen Problemen der Philosophie und der Kunst. Dieser Band nimmt eine häufige Kontrastierung kritisch in den Blick: Die Abgrenzung der ganzheitlichen Darstellung der Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit in der Kunst von abstrakten philosophischen Diskursen. Wirklichkeit des Daseins ist die Thematik menschlicher Existenz, die zur Frage nach Wahrheit aufrufen kann. Der Weg aus dem bedeutungsleeren philosophischen Wahrheitsbegriff führt daher über die Erkenntnis, dass Wahrheit als ein Wertbegriff des menschlichen Lebens und der menschlichen Gesellschaft zu verstehen ist. Goethe sieht in der Wahrheit den höchsten Wert für die Erkenntnis, den Glauben oder das Handeln. Im Begriff ›Wahrheit‹ dominiert ein ethischer Anspruch, der sich im geistigen Leben verabsolutiert und mit einer unverbindlichen Liebeserklärung endet. Der Wahrheitsanspruch eines Kunstwerkes in seinem in sich geschlossenen Ganzen sucht Innerlichkeit und Vision, die zur echten Wahrheit des Lebens helfen will.

L'Orient et l'Occident ont toujours eu des rapports tendus et la mondialisation galopante n'a fait que les exacerber davantage. Mais il est difficile d'aborder de tels phénomènes totaux sans une approche globale qui permet de chercher la vérité des événements, des choses et des êtres pour dépasser les malentendus et les risques de confrontation. La trilogie de Yasmina Khadra, grâce aux moyens propres à la littérature, semble nous inviter à une telle investigation.

Erich Auerbach's seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature was published more than sixty years ago and is deservedly considered a classic. The book brought into focus the fundamental difference that exists between the two basic approaches to the textual representation of reality in Western culture. These two “styles,” as Auerbach called them, were archetypically displayed in Homer's poems and in the Old Testament, respectively. Auerbach's differentiation is the starting point for Bandera's insightful work, which expands and develops on this theory in several key ways. One of the more significant differences between the two styles transcends and grounds all the others. It concerns the truth of each of the two archetypal texts, or rather, the attitude exhibited in those texts with regard to the truth of what they narrate. Auerbach, Bandera notes, is amazed at the Bible's “passionate” concern for the truth of what it says—a concern he found absent in Homer. Bandera finds that what the prophet Isaiah called “a refuge of lies” defines Homer's work. He draws on his own research and René Girard's theory of the sacred to develop an enhanced perspective of the relationship between these texts.

What is the difference between writing a novel about the Holocaust and fabricating a memoir? Do narratives about the Holocaust have a special obligation to be'truthful'--that is, faithful to the facts of history? Or is it okay to lie in such works? In her provocative study A Thousand Darknesses, Ruth Franklin investigates these questions as they arise in the most significant works of Holocaust fiction, from Tadeusz Borowski's Auschwitz stories to Jonathan Safran Foer's postmodernist family history. Franklin argues that the memory-obsessed culture of the last few decades has led us to mistakenly focus on testimony as the only valid form of Holocaust writing. As even the most canonical texts have come under scrutiny for their fidelity to the facts, we have lost sight of the essential role that imagination plays in the creation of any literary work, including the memoir. Taking a fresh look at memoirs by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and examining novels by writers such as Piotr Rawicz, Jerzy Kosinski, W.G. Sebald, and Wolfgang Koeppen, Franklin makes a persuasive case for literature as an equally vital vehicle for understanding the Holocaust (and for memoir as an equally ambiguous form). The result is a study of immense depth and range that offers a lucid view of an often cloudy field.

Its champions—and its detractors—have often understood the novel as the genre par excellence of truthlessness. The Narrative Shape of Truth counters this widely accepted view. It argues instead that the novel has found new, historically specific configurations of truth and narrative. The nineteenth-century novel, in particular, can be understood as responding to the emerging tendency to view truth as inseparable from, rather than opposed to, time. Ilya Kliger offers a nonreductive way of reading the histories of philosophy and the novel side by side. He identifies the crucial moment in the epistemological history of narrative when, at the end of the eighteenth century, a new structural affiliation between truth and time emerged. This book examines novels by four authors—Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—as well as the writings of leading European intellectuals and philosophers. Kliger argues that the “realist” novel can be conceived as prompting us (and giving us the means) to think of truth differently, as immanent in a temporal shape rather than transcendent in a principle, a fact, or a higher order.

Ce livre reconstitue le rapport entre vérité et altérité au siècle des Lumières. Il s'agit ici de s'arrêter sur les mécanismes théoriques qui auraient cimenté à jamais l'altérité et la vérité. Avec des exemples tirés de la philosophie et de la théorie littéraire, l'auteur porte un regard sur les antinomies d'un siècle présumé d'avant-garde, des antinomies qui font de la fiction de ce siècle un chef-d'oeuvre esthétique d'une grande modernité.

Ausgehend von detaillierten Textanalysen der Artusromane Hartmanns von Aue und des Prosa-Lancelot wird in der Studie das interdependente Verhältnis von fictio- und historia-Konzeptionen untersucht und gezeigt, daß die Inanspruchnahme einer von Legitimationsformen freien Fiktionalität mit der Entfunktionalisierung und Verfügbarkeit traditioneller Historisierungsstrategien einhergeht. Während dies im Erec Hartmanns vor allem in Auseinandersetzung mit den verschiedenen Konnotationen des fictio-Begriffes realisiert wird, rückt in Hartmanns Iwein die Auseinandersetzung mit historia-Elementen verstärkt in den Blick, so daß Historizität letztlich für die fiktionale Erzählung verfügbar wird. Auf der Basis dieser literarästhetischen Entwicklung wird sodann gezeigt, daß der Prosa-Lancelot sich mit jener Relativierung und Verfügbarkeit traditioneller Historizitätsmerkmale auseinandersetzt. Der den Lancelot kennzeichnende Anspruch, den Artusstoff zu re-historisieren, wird auf Grund der bereits für fiktionales Erzählen verfügbaren historia-Elemente immer wieder konterkariert und gerät somit zu einer subtilen Auseinandersetzung mit den Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der arthurischen Erzähltradition.

The essays collected in this volume are all concerned with the connection between fiction and truth. This question is of utmost importance to metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic and epistemology, raising in each of these areas and at their intersections a large number of issues related to creation, existence, reference, identity, modality, belief, assertion, imagination, pretense, etc. All these topics and many more are addressed in this collection, which brings together original essays written from various points of view by philosophers of diverse trends. These essays constitute major contributions to the current debates that the connection between truth and fiction continually enlivens, and give a sense of the directions in which research on this question is heading.

In this provocative essay, David Adams Richards brings together his ideas about writing -- how great works of literature are created, the writer's essential position as an outsider, and the difficulties writers experience in the pursuit of personal truth. The quest for truth always comes with a price, says Richards, but it also results in freedom for writers and their characters, and sometimes results in great works of literature. Says Richards,'What I say to young writers is never fear that you too will be evaluated most harshly in your life for telling the truth. That the truth, not as others see it, but as you do, can only be told by you... The most important gift you can give the world is to write how you feel... There are no guarantees if you do this, but there is no hope if you do not.'Playing the Inside Out is the Second Antonine Maillet-Northrop Frye Lecture, sponsored by the Université de Moncton. It was presented on April 28, 2007 in Moncton, New Brunswick, at the 2007 Frye Festival.

The colonialist West has spoken for New Mexico since 1540 when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado traveled to Acoma Pueblo in his search for the legendary cities of gold. With the Spanish incursion, followed fifty-six years later by the first English-speaking colonists in New Mexico, began the representation of New Mexico from an outsider's perspective. The colonial West imagined itself to hold central claims to knowledge, so it knew its peripheries only as it encountered and articulated their presence to itself. This Western narrative, based on an imagined Western privilege to foundational or platonic knowledge, has become the dominant Euro-American discourse through which New Mexico has come to be known. History is not a stable narrative of the past, but a fluid collection of competing narratives that continues to change and expand as it is revisited. Through a postcolonial lens, this study negotiates travel and encounter narratives that imagine and re-imagine New Mexico during one of its most dynamic shifts in identity: from the mid-nineteenth century (when the United States conquered Mexico and made New Mexico a U.S. territory) to the mid-twentieth century (when the Native American literary renaissance began). Issues of identity (transformed by the New Mexico landscape) and race, religion and culture (through the lens of colonialism) are vitally apparent in this study and clearly brought to the surface and explained. The introduction provides an excellent overview of travel literature connected to the age of unprecedented European and (then) U.S. expansionism. The definition and subsequent categorization of travel narratives are very useful to the reader entering this still largely uncharted territory. The author identifies travel in territories undergoing colonization as a challenge to the integrity of the Western construct of the self, which is identified in the broader literature as an important and relevant area of investigation. The book unquestionably makes a contribution to this larger body of work. The book also does an admirable job of mapping New Mexico as a symbolic landscape that shifts meanings over time and through the perceptions of various travelers. The comparative study of this collection of travel and contact narratives traces the enforcement of––and resistance to––the Western myth of the Euro-American and European as normative, as well as the Hispanic and the native as Other. The author ably introduces the platonic quest as a new unifying thread that links each of these travel narratives to his argument that identity and claims to knowledge may be tested, recovered, or created in movement within New Mexico. The platonic journey has mostly been understood as an intellectual journey toward truth. This study expands upon the platonic journey to show that it may also, like the quest, be played out in geographical space. Travel Narratives from New Mexico will be a very valuable resource for students and scholars of literature, especially of the American Southwest and travel theory.

In this landmark collection, Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians. They are all storytellers, wrestling with a fascinating gray area where memory intersects with history and where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts. and whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story—while also telling us true.'reading each of these superb and provocative essays, readers understand history in the memoir and memoir in the history. What all the writers recognize?is that they and their disciplines all deal with the vagaries of memory and how humans construct meaning in the present through memory, however expressed. a superb book. Highly recommended.'—Choice

Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of A Million Little Pieces, the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers'claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, “How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it's true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, ‘This is really true'? Why do they choose to say it then?” The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of nonfiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means. Contributors: John D'Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray González, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer