Título: Seven Modes of Uncertainty
Autor: C. Namwali Serpell
Sinopse: Literature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to perplex and its ethical value? Seven Modes of Uncertainty contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience. Literature is rife with uncertainty. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about reading literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to unsettle, perplex, and bewilder us, and literature's ethical value? To revive this question, C. Namwali Serpell proposes a return to William Empson's groundbreaking work, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), which contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our own experience. Taking as case studies experimental novels by Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Elliot Perlman, Tom McCarthy, and Jonathan Safran Foer, Serpell suggests that literary uncertainty emerges from the reader's shifting responses to structures of conflicting information. A number of these novels employ a structure of mutual exclusion, which presents opposed explanations for the same events. Some use a structure of multiplicity, which presents different perspectives regarding events or characters. The structure of repetition in other texts destabilizes the continuity of events and frustrates our ability to follow the story. To explain how these structures produce uncertainty, Serpell borrows from cognitive psychology the concept of affordance, which describes an object's or environment's potential uses. Moving through these narrative structures affords various ongoing modes of uncertainty, which in turn afford ethical experiences both positive and negative. At the crossroads of recent critical turns to literary form, reading practices, and ethics, Seven Modes of Uncertainty offers a new phenomenology of how we read uncertainty now.
Contexto da obra
Quando a classificação é mais ampla, o contexto do livro costuma depender ainda mais de autoria, tema e edição. “Seven Modes of Uncertainty”, de C. Namwali Serpell, publicado pela editora Harvard University Press, em 2014 e com 408 páginas, integra a categoria Livros Variados. Por isso, autoria, edição e tema acabam tendo ainda mais peso na forma de apresentar o livro.
Editora: Harvard University Press
Páginas: 408
Ano: 2014
Edição:
Linguagem: pt_BR
ISBN: 0674729099
ISBN13:
Sobre a editora
Os livros da editora Harvard University Press costumam oferecer leituras densas e fundamentadas, que exploram temas complexos como ciência, história, filosofia e política com rigor e profundidade. A experiência de leitura frequentemente envolve narrativas detalhadas que combinam pesquisa acadêmica com relatos históricos ou análises conceituais, como o estudo de grandes telescópios, debates sobre moralidade, ou a história de movimentos sociais. O tom varia entre o informativo e o reflexivo, com ritmo que pode ser tanto mais narrativo quanto analítico, dependendo do tema. O catálogo revela uma atenção especial a processos históricos e científicos, com textos que dialogam com questões contemporâneas e culturais, favorecendo leitores que buscam compreensão crítica e contextualizada.
