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引用次数: 0
摘要
根据弗兰克·克莫德(Frank Kermode)的说法,严肃小说避免了开头、中间和结尾的启示录范式。然而,克莫德没有注意到的部分范式是,正义的力量不可避免地击败了邪恶。本文探讨了存在于这一范式之外的各种文学小说中邪恶的叙事命运。本文以乔纳森·弗兰岑(Jonathan Franzen)充满邪恶表征的小说为例,找出弗兰岑对约翰·沃尔夫冈·冯·歌德(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)的执迷之源,并认为,随着神正论在18世纪欧洲失势,歌德发展了一种原始存在主义诗学,试图解决邪恶的明显必然性。因此,本文旨在为弗兰岑的文学计划提供一种新的历史化解读;注意神正论的崩溃对文学小说发展的意义;并将歌德定位为一个批判的声音,从崩溃中脱颖而出,并提出文学小说作为神学范式的一种话语选择。
Serious fiction, according to Frank Kermode, avoids the apocalyptic paradigm of beginning, middle, and end. Part of the paradigm that escaped Kermode’s attention, however, is the inevitable defeat of evil by forces of good. The present essay inquires after the narratological fate of evil in the sorts of literary fiction that exist outside this paradigm. Taking up the novels of Jonathan Franzen, which are replete with representations of evil, this essay locates the sources of Franzen’s fixation in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and argues that, as theodicy fell out of favor in the European eighteenth century, Goethe developed a proto-existential poetics that sought to reckon with the apparent ineluctability of evil. The essay thus aims to offer a newly historicized reading of Franzen’s literary project; to draw attention to the significance of the collapse of theodicy for the development of literary fiction; and to position Goethe as a critical voice to emerge from that collapse and put forward literary fiction as a discursive alternative to theological paradigms.
期刊介绍:
MLQ focuses on change, both in literary practice and within the profession of literature itself. The journal is open to essays on literary change from the Middle Ages to the present and welcomes theoretical reflections on the relationship of literary change or historicism to feminism, ethnic studies, cultural materialism, discourse analysis, and all other forms of representation and cultural critique. Seeing texts as the depictions, agents, and vehicles of change, MLQ targets literature as a commanding and vital force.