Harold Kaplan entitled his essay on Madame Bovary ‘the seriousness of comedy’. In his view, and that of other literary critics cited by him, this work is a ‘special form of dry comedy’ in that it stresses the conflict between feeling agent and unfeeling object. Its effect is the spirit of comedy without humor.
(more…)Series: An Approach to Modern Fiction
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Modernism’s Contempt for the Human Intellect
The skeptical mode is the source of modernism’s contempt for the human intellect. Or maybe it’s better to say modernism’s contempt for the human’s ability to know anything. Harold Kaplan1 says we have come to believe this mode is the strongest trait of an enlightened modern consciousness. Metaphysics might seem to be the focus of this skepticism, but its focus is primarily the ordinary human consciousness.
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The Crisis of Knowledge
In this series, I want to share my thoughts about Harold Kaplan’s book, The Passive Voice1. Kaplan deals with several related literary topics, but they all arise from the crisis of knowledge in modern intellectual history. I have some doubts about my part in this endeavor, which I’ll state briefly in this introduction to the series.
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