Unknow­ing: The Work of Mod­ernist Fic­tion : Philip Weinstein

When and why does west­ern fic­tion become dif­fi­cult to read? My lec­ture takes on this ques­tion,” Wein­stein says. “Mod­ernist writ­ers of unknow­ing refuse to tell the West’s favorite story: that of a hero or hero­ine mov­ing through trou­ble and even­tu­ally com­ing to know. I explore how we in the West came to tell that favorite story, why we have cycled and recy­cled it for over two cen­turies. Then, around the turn of the last cen­tury, a group of thinkers and writers-Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, and Freud among them-worked to reshape our very sense of the human drama. They revised our most com­mon­sen­si­cal ways of under­stand­ing our­selves in space and time and among oth­ers. The aim of the lec­ture is to explain why they are so dif­fi­cult to read. No less impor­tant, I’ll try to per­suade my audi­ence that their dif­fi­culty is invaluable.”