000			a
999			_c33780 _d33780
008			250320b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780804752893
082			_a809.9353 _bFRA
100			_aFrancois, Anne-Lise
245			_aOpen secrets : the literature of uncounted experience
260			_bStanford University Press, _c2008 _aStanford :
300			_axxiv, 290 p. ; _c23 cm
365			_b32.00 _c$ _d90.60
490			_aMeridian
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
520			_aOpen Secrets identifies an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action in Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves (1678), Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), and poems by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy. The author argues that these works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular that of self-concealment and self-presentation. Declining the twin pressures of self-actualization and self-denial defining modernity's call to make good on one's talents, the subjects of the 'literature of uncounted experience' do nothing so heroic as renounce ambitions of self-expression; they simply set aside the fantasy of the all-responsible subject. The originality of Open Secrets is thus to imagine the non-instrumental without casting it as a heavy ethical burden. Non-appropriation emerges not as what is difficult to do but as the path of least resistance.
650			_aAmerican literature
650			_aHistory and criticism
650			_aPassivity
650			_aSilence
650			_aRomanticism
942			_2ddc _cBK