This book examines three first-person novels that narrate spectacular
failures of self-representation. In an innovative move, the author
grounds these failures in the narrators' inability to move beyond
Empiricist notions of correspondence between private, nonverbal
experience and public expression, an inability that confines them to
various forms of solipsism. Russo contends that such Empiricist notions
still inform contemporary French novels and criticism. She deftly shows
that current forms of linguistic skepticism favored by Blanchot, Sartre,
Barthes, and Derrida are in fact the very product of the Empiricist
notion of truth these authors claim to have rejected. Instead, she
argues for the social and contextual dimension of language and against
the illusion of authenticity on which these critics still rely. Her
readings recast the debates surrounding postmodernism by placing them in
a much-needed historical context. Through a series of lively close
readings of Prevost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne, Constant's
Adolphe, and Des Forets's Le Bavard, Russo establishes the continuous
legacy of Empiricism across three centuries. Prevost pins his narrator's
interpretive difficulties on an inability to know and categorize
Oriental reality, Constant grounds his critique of language on the same
ethical and political principles that underlie his liberalism, while Des
Forets's extreme solipsism pitches him against the Sartrean notion of
engagement.
