The overcoming of history in War and Peace / Jeff Love.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-206) and index.

Print version record.

English.

Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1. Narrative and Striving -- 2. Purpose and Outline of this Book -- 3. The Critical Tradition -- Chapter One: Skepticism -- 1. Skepticism in the Fictional Text -- 2. Skepticism in the Historical Essays -- Chapter Two: The Calculus of History -- 1. Borodino -- 2. The Calculus of History -- 3. Calculus in the Novel -- Chapter Three: A Temporality of Contradiction -- 1. Temporality in the Novel -- 2. Epic and Novelistic Temporality -- 3. The End of Time -- Chapter Four: The Fundamental Structure -- 1. The Problem of History -- 2. Freedom -- 3. The Relation of Reason and Consciousness -- 4. The Problem of History Revisited -- Chapter Five: Mastery and Reticence -- 1. Napoleon and Mastery -- 2. The Tragic Path -- 3. The Comic Path -- Conclusion: Freedom and Silence -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.

The Overcoming of History in "War and Peace" marks a radical departure from the critical tradition dominated by Sir Isaiah Berlin's view that the novel is deeply divided against itself, a majestically flawed contest of brilliant art and clumsy thought. To the contrary, Jeff Love argues that the apparently divided nature of the text, its multi-leveled negotiation between different kinds of representation, expresses the rich variety of the novel's very deliberate striving to capture the fluidity of change and becoming in the fixed forms of language. The inevitable failure of this striving, revealing the irreducible conflict between infinite desire and finite capacity, is at once the source of new beginnings and the repetition of old ones, a wellspring of continually renewed promises to achieve a synoptic vision of the whole that the novel cannot fulfill. This repetitive struggle between essentially comic and tragic conceptions of human action, far from being a pervasive flaw in the texture of the novel, in fact constitutes its dynamic center and principal trope as well as the productive origin of the unusual features that distinguish it as an uncommonly bold narrative experiment.

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