Seven Modes of Uncertainty

by Namwali Serpell

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674729094
Publisher:	Harvard
Publication date:	04/30/2014
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

C. Namwali Serpell is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

I Mutual Exclusion 41

1 Oscillation: Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) 45

2 Enfolding: Rereading Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001) 79

II Multiplicity 115

3 Adjacency: Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) 119

4 Accounting: Interreading William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), Shirley Jackson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity" (1943), and Elliot Perlman's Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003) 153

III Repetition 191

5 Vacuity: Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho (1991) 195

6 Synchronicity: Metareading Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005) 230

7 Conclusion: Flippancy: Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005) 269

Appendix 1 The Vagaries of the New Ethics 293

Appendix 2 Seven Modes of Uncertainty 303

Notes 305

Acknowledgments 379

Index 381

Editorial Reviews

Seven Modes of Uncertainty makes major contributions to our understanding of the ethics of the novel and of the eight novels it analyzes. Serpell is not only well-informed about the relevant scholarship, but she also treats it with impressive intelligence as she carves out her own fresh and appealing approach to narrative ethics. She proves herself, again and again, to be a marvelously insightful reader and an engaging and accomplished writer.

James Phelan

Seven Modes of Uncertainty is quite an extraordinary accomplishment. Serpell is impressively learned and original; she writes with conspicuous ease, wit, elegance, and force. She brilliantly presents detailed readings of a series of novels and stories—from Nabokov’s Lolita to Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 to Ellis’s American Psycho—as well as amazingly comprehensive accounts of the previous essays and reviews on those works. This book is consistently fascinating, page after page.

J. Hillis Miller

Read More