Seven Modes of Uncertainty

Literature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to perplex and its ethical value? C. Namwali Serpell contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes [...]
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Literature is uncertain. Literature is good for us. These two ideas about literature are often taken for granted. But what is the relationship between literature's capacity to perplex and its ethical value? C. Namwali Serpell contends that literary uncertainty is crucial to ethics because it pushes us beyond the limits of our experience. Analyzing 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.