The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy

by Yi-Ping Ong

The Art of Being is a powerful account of how the literary form of the novel reorients philosophy toward the meaning of existence. Yi-Ping Ong shows that for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir, the form of the novel in its classic phase yields the conditions for reconceptualizing the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. Their discovery gives rise to a radically new poetics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel.

For the existentialists, a paradox lies at the heart of the novel. As a work of art, the novel exists as a given totality. At the same time, the capacity of the novel to compel belief in the free and independent existence of its characters depends on the absence of any perspective from which their lives may be viewed as a consummated whole. At stake in the poetics of the novel are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible. Ong’s reframing of foundational debates in novel theory takes us beyond old dichotomies of mind and world, interiority and totality, and form and mimesis. It illuminates existential dimensions of novelistic realism overlooked by empirical and sociological approaches.

Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, The Art of Being reveals how the novel engages in its very form with philosophically rich notions of self-knowledge, freedom, authority, world, and the unfinished character of human life.

304 pages, Hardcover

Published December 10, 2018

Reviews

[Searnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opening comment: this book deals with a subject- how literature meets philosophy meets literature- that makes my palms sweat. That is that it partners Rebecca Schuman's "Kafka and Wittgenstein" for its insight into this weave of intellectual endeavors. Moreover, Ong's examination or rather her disclosure of Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy; a philosophy that holds that realist novels, for example, just are a way of doing a philosophy of existence; a way of answering such questions as, "How is one to live?, or "In the face of death what is the meaning of one's life?" (One offers that the picture on the cover of this book suggests the duality of our human being-ness, that is that we exist in two worlds at once: one of freedom, of spirit, of choice and of responsibility and one of dark and contingent facticity.) Here is a new thought, perhaps the cover depicts "The Spirit above the Dust" or the owl of Minerva.

[Hsu Jui-Ting · Rating 3 out of 5]

An extremely frustrating and elephantine summation of a large corpus of works, all situated within a Western canon - moreso incredible that Yi-Ping Ong can summate these works, but entirely more frustrating that her argumentative voice is stifled, muzzled, and ultimately submerged by the many quotations and narratives that she invokes in her stead. This book also feels like a precursor to a very engaging sort of undergraduate class, one that - with more time to digest the books in full - would amplify her argument on the poetics of the novel, but here becomes entirely secondary and merely epistolary when taken on its own.