Citation de Thelx
What kind of knowledge do we hope to derive from reading novels, which tell us stories we know are not “true”? One traditional answer to that question is: knowledge of the human heart, or mind. The novelist has an intimate access to the secret thoughts of her characters denied to the historian, the biographer or even the psychoanalyst. The novel, therefore, can offer us more or less convincing models of how and why people act as they do. Postmodernism and poststructuralism have deconstructed but not demolished the Christian or liberal humanist ideas of the self on which this project is based – the unique, autonomous individual responsible for his or her own acts. We continue to value novels, especially novels in the classic realist tradition, for the light they throw on human motivation.
