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idea that narrative operates as a symbolic resolution of realities
that are undesirable, uncontrollable, or unbearable has gained considerable
currency in fields as diverse as Marxist criticism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
What has received less attention is that narratives largely lose their
effectiveness when their symbolic nature is uncovered, when the resolutions
they offer are revealed to be ''merely'' symbolic. Acts of Fiction demonstrates how narratives operate under cover, negotiating problematic
realities while masking their rhetorical strategies.
Scott Carpenter shows how the restructuring of society in postrevolutionary
France (1795-1869) triggered a variety of narrative attempts to
come to terms with social, political, and epistemological shifts.
While identifying four modes of writing in works by Sade, Balzac,
Nerval, and Baudelaire, Carpenter studies the entanglements of literature
and history, demonstrating how narratives were used to re-engineer
the cultural imagination. Acts of Fiction draws on popular
culture, iconography, science, philosophy, and politics and is informed
by a wide range of critics, including Foucault, Chambers, Terdiman,
Jameson, and Petrey. |
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