Description
Pseudo-Memoirs redefines the notion of fiction itself, a form that has all too often been understood in terms of its capacity to produce a seeming reality. Rochelle Tobias argues that the verisimilitude of the novel derives not from its object but from the subjectivity at its base. What generates the plausibility of fiction is not the referentiality of its depictions but the intentionality of consciousness.
Edmund Husserl developed the idea that consciousness is always intentional in the sense that it is directed outside itself toward something that it does not find so much as it constitutes as an object. Pseudo-memoirs reveal the full implications of this position in their double structure as the tale of their own telling or the fiction of life-writing. In so doing they reveal how the world of fiction is constructed, but more important they bring to the fore the idealist premises that fuel the novel and guarantee its truth, even when it remains an invention of the imagination.
Rochelle Tobias explores novels by Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and W. G. Sebald in conjunction with philosophical and theoretical texts by Rene Descartes, Husserl, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gyoergy Lukacs, Roland Barthes, and Maurice Blanchot.
About the Author
Rochelle Tobias is a professor of German at Johns Hopkins University and the director of the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought. She is the author of The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World and editor of Hoelderlin's Philosophy of Nature.
Reviews
"Pseudo-Memoirs is a great scholarly achievement that has lain the groundwork for new directions in research on (auto-)biographical fiction."-Benjamin Schaper, Germanic Review
"The literary eccentrics studied here have been gathered together before . . . but Tobias's highly original and creative philosophical argument makes it a gathering worth attending."-Paul Buchholz, Monatshefte
"With its bold reevaluation of the relationship between fictional and nonfictional discourses, Pseudo-Memoirs offers an important new perspective on the concept of realism and invites us to rethink our understanding of the ideological force of authorial paradigms."-Jan Mieszkowski, author of Crises of the Sentence
"Remarkable. . . . Refreshingly immune to the passing fads of our critical situation, Rochelle Tobias's sober and caring study makes valuable and lasting contributions to the intersection of literature and philosophy, German studies, comparative modernism, literary theory, narratology, and the study of aesthetic autobiography."-Gerhard Richter, University Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University
Book Information
ISBN 9780803215924
Author Rochelle Tobias
Format Hardback
Page Count 222
Imprint University of Nebraska Press
Publisher University of Nebraska Press
Edmund Husserl developed the idea that consciousness is always intentional in the sense that it is directed outside itself toward something that it does not find so much as it constitutes as an object. Pseudo-memoirs reveal the full implications of this position in their double structure as the tale of their own telling or the fiction of life-writing. In so doing they reveal how the world of fiction is constructed, but more important they bring to the fore the idealist premises that fuel the novel and guarantee its truth, even when it remains an invention of the imagination.
Rochelle Tobias explores novels by Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and W. G. Sebald in conjunction with philosophical and theoretical texts by Rene Descartes, Husserl, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gyoergy Lukacs, Roland Barthes, and Maurice Blanchot.
About the Author
Rochelle Tobias is a professor of German at Johns Hopkins University and the director of the Max Kade Center for Modern German Thought. She is the author of The Discourse of Nature in the Poetry of Paul Celan: The Unnatural World and editor of Hoelderlin's Philosophy of Nature.
Reviews
"Pseudo-Memoirs is a great scholarly achievement that has lain the groundwork for new directions in research on (auto-)biographical fiction."-Benjamin Schaper, Germanic Review
"The literary eccentrics studied here have been gathered together before . . . but Tobias's highly original and creative philosophical argument makes it a gathering worth attending."-Paul Buchholz, Monatshefte
"With its bold reevaluation of the relationship between fictional and nonfictional discourses, Pseudo-Memoirs offers an important new perspective on the concept of realism and invites us to rethink our understanding of the ideological force of authorial paradigms."-Jan Mieszkowski, author of Crises of the Sentence
"Remarkable. . . . Refreshingly immune to the passing fads of our critical situation, Rochelle Tobias's sober and caring study makes valuable and lasting contributions to the intersection of literature and philosophy, German studies, comparative modernism, literary theory, narratology, and the study of aesthetic autobiography."-Gerhard Richter, University Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University
Book Information
ISBN 9780803215924
Author Rochelle Tobias
Format Hardback
Page Count 222
Imprint University of Nebraska Press
Publisher University of Nebraska Press
