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The opening chapter seeks to orient the book as a whole, discussing the relationship between philosophy and the novel both in general and in relationship to Kundera and his self-identified tradition in specific. It seeks to articulate the nature of the book’s own voice—how does one speak in and from the border at which philosophy and the novel (themselves internally contested) meet? In addition to a meditation on the problem of the border (both for Kundera and for the aims of my book), this chapter includes a case study: Plato’s Symposium and Kundera’s early novelistic variation of it (his short story, “The Symposium”).

This chapter first analyzes Milan Kundera's novel The Joke (1967). It argues that the novel constructs a narrative economy that establishes complex links between the erotic and the political in the context of Cold War discourse. The discussion then turns to Philip Roth's novel I Married a Communist, one of the most eloquent examples in American contemporary fiction of what Kundera called the “privatization” of the political. It is argued that I Married a Communist is not only a Cold War text, but is also a novel about the legitimacy of pragmatic selfishness in American culture.

This chapter continues the problematic introduced in the first chapter. How does one speak of what Kundera calls “the universe of the novel,” and how does one distinguish it from what he calls “graphomania” (the aggressive urge to lord one’s ego over others in the form of writing)? Central to this chapter’s discussion is Blanchot’s distinction between works and the Book as well as the poetry of Charles Simic. How do the autonomous universes of philosophy and the novel (in the sense of non-graphomaniacal works) mutually clarify and challenge one another?

In many of Kundera’s novels and other writings, the figure of the dog appears, almost surreptitiously, as a being whose mode of being contests what Kundera calls the “grand march” of “History.” After discussing the place of dogs in Kundera’s (and also Kafka’s) writings, this chapter turns, as does Kundera, to the figure of Nietzsche as the thinker whose sensibility is closest to the problem (and its traditional invisibility) as it emerges at the border between the universes of the novel and philosophy, respectively. Central to its analysis is Kundera’s masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which provides the clearest manifestation of this chapter’s concern.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the nature of knowledge in organizations, based on an essay by Czech writer Milan Kundera, which examined a novel written at the beginning of the century by Jaromir John. The frustration of the character depicted in the story is linked to the present book. The purpose and scope of the book, reasons for focusing on the automotive sector, and structure and content of the book are presented.

Kitsch is one of the problems for which Kundera is best known, and it is an insight that he in part takes over from the remarkable writings of Hermann Broch. This chapter takes the latter’s contention seriously: In the mode of disclosure germane to the universe of the novel (“what only the novel can do”), kitsch is not bad art, but radical evil. This line of thinking has two corollaries: 1) kitsch is non-art, posing as art, and 2) its failure is therefore not only aesthetic but also ethical (the ethical transgression of anti-art masking itself as art).

According to a traditional Cartesian conception of selfhood, the human self, as a repository of inwardly knowable content, exists prior to and separable from any context, situation, or relation into which it contingently enters. Corresponding to this view is the conception of linguistic meaning as being wholly determined by the inward mental content of the speaker also independent of any external relations. In striking contrast to this, the relational conception of selfhood developed by the classical American pragmatists and others since sees the self as created within, and constituted by, the webs of relations into which it enters and within which it actually acquires its identity and its content. I suggest here that there is a parallel way of looking at words, and that to truly understand a person is in part to genuinely understand the webs of relations, references, allusions, connotations, cross-circumstance resonances, and so forth that give a person’s words their meaning. This, I suggest, is close to what Wittgenstein referred to as “the field of a word”, which he insisted is decisive in determining a word’s meaning. Thus the understanding of a person biographically requires an understanding, with this relation-embedded complexity, of their words.

This chapter continues the analysis from the prior chapter by considering the transformation of the figure of the idiot in the novel. It moves from Don Quixote to Prince Myshkin (in Dostoevsky’s Idiot) and concludes with a consideration of Kundera’s authorial voice. The latter is Kundera’s gift to philosophy and to thinking more generally: the idiocy of solitude. Here dogmatic urges and the mania for definitive conclusions vindicate Nietzsche’s lament: “the gruesome seriousness and awkward importunity with which the dogmatists previously tended to approach the truth were maladroit and indecorous means” (Beyond Good and Evil, KSA, 5: 11).

Finally, I return to the theme of sentimentality with a particular focus on art and what is often called “kitsch” I ask, as I did for sentimentality in general, What's wrong with kitsch? And I defend it, as I did for sentimentality, by suggesting that the attacks on kitsch are often not what they seem to be.

The final two chapters belong together and explore in genealogical detail the nature of a novelist’s authorial voice in relationship to the problem of History (the grand march of reason). These two chapters do so by broadly taking up the question of imitation (μίμησις‎) or repetition in relationship to the universe of the novel. How does the novel take itself up again when it does not claim the power to represent itself to itself and when its compositional forms are subject to ongoing negotiation? The novel does not recognize itself because it both eschews representation (of its universe and of itself) and continues to experiment with its forms. Nonetheless it is possible to speak of a history of the novel, albeit a history that is a revenge on the grand march of self-representation that we call History. What is this elusive temporality that allows the novel to develop discernible lineages without ceasing to be a question to itself? How do we grasp the history of the novel, “which is not a mere succession of events but an intentional pursuit of values” (Art of the Novel, 154)? Given that this present study locates itself in the mobile border between the universe of philosophy and the universe of the novel, these two chapters address the problem at hand by examining the borderline persona of the idiot. This chapter begins with a consideration of Nietzsche and then traces this figure from Saint Paul via Cusanus, Descartes, and Ignatius of Loyola.

Critics have classified African and Caribbean novels as “polyphonic” with little consideration of what precisely this entails. This chapter puts forth a more precise definition of polyphony by reading Maryse Condé's canonical novel, Traversée de la mangrove [Crossing the Mangrove], against leading theorists of literary polyphony, Mikhail Bakhtin and Milan Kundera. Because it takes the form of a ritual wake and features multiple narrators, critics have widely hailed Condé's novel as an exemplary instance of polyphonic writing. On closer examination, however, the novel challenges a common misperception about literary polyphony, namely the idea that a written text can approximate oral culture and give voice to disenfranchised subjects. This reading attends to the distinct levels of narration at work in Condé's novel to show how the text creates a false impression of intimacy and community, while maintaining an aesthetic of opacity. The chapter assesses the aesthetic strategies and ethical priorities of Condé's writing against those of other major Caribbean writers: Césaire, Glissant, and Chamoiseau. It argues that the uncritical use of the term “polyphony” in relation to Condé's fiction (and that of other authors from the Global South) has obscured our understanding of ethics and representation, and muted the social critique present in many of these texts.

The epilogue rounds out the argument of the volume by considering the declining cultural authority of the novel, the value of history versus the history of the arts, Bakhtin’s most famous aphorism, the concept of great time, and the explanatory power of Bakhtin’s approach to the novel as a distinct form of discourse.

The visitor to Prague, one of the oldest sites in Europe, cannot fail to be impressed by the architectural diversity of this lovely city: Romanesque, Gothic, baroque, Sezession, and cubism succeed each other in a dazzling layering of styles. A major reason for Prague's miraculous preservation is the fact that it was spared the wartime destruction that reduced to ashes other central European cities such as Warsaw, Berlin, and Dresden. In a particularly ironic twist of history, Adolf Hitler deliberately preserved the remains of the city's ancient Jewish Quarter—including the medieval Old–New Synagogue and the nearby cemetery—as a museum of Europe's “extinguished race.” This book presents Prague as a constantly rewritten or revised text in which history and imagination, memory and forgetting have been impossible to disentangle. Most cultural accounts of Prague treat the city either as an unbroken historical continuum or as a site of the imagination tout court.