Description
Book SynopsisThe Challenge of Bewilderment treats the epistemology of representation in major works by Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, attempting to explain how the novel turned away from its traditional concern with realistic representation and toward self-consciousness about the relation between knowing and narration. Paul B. Armstrong here addresses the pivotal thematic experience of bewilderment, an experience that challenges the reader's very sense of reality and that shows it to have no more certainty or stability than an interpretative construct.
Through readings of The Sacred Fount and The Ambassadors by James, Lord Jim and Nostromo by Conrad, and The Good Soldier and Parade's End by Ford, Armstrong examines how each writer dramatizes his understanding of the act of knowing. Armstrong demonstrates how the novelists' attitudes toward the process of knowing inform experiments with representation, through which they th
Trade Review
In short, Armstrong’s close, careful readings of James, Conrad, and Ford incorporate philosophical aesthetics into a unique interpretive vocabulary. As a result, The Challenge of Bewilderment finally advocates what it examines: the idea that readers may learn through a reflective response to bewilderment to suspend their investment in the social codes that construct their world, while attaining a capacity to reflect critically on the self-sustaining artifice of signs and meaning.
-- Richard Swartz * The Henry James Review *
