Sterne: Tristram Shandy

Without a beginning and without an end, Tristram Shandy moves in many different directions, defying the conventional expectations of its readers.

Wolfgang Iser (Edited by), David Henry Wilson (Translated by)

9780521312639, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 April 1988

156 pages
20.3 x 13.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.25 kg

Without a beginning and without an end, Tristram Shandy moves in many different directions, defying the conventional expectations of its readers. Wolfgang Iser shows how Sterne exploits the philosophy of his day and its cognitive deficiencies, using digression, humour and play to convey experience of subjectivity, and implicitly to expose the traditional concept of the self.

Part I. Subjectivity revealed through textual fields of reference: 1. Does Tristram Shandy have a beginning?
2. Subjectivity discovered through Locke's philosophy
3. Locke's philosophy as a pattern of communication
4. Manic subjectivity
5. Melancholic subjectivity
6. Decentred subjectivity
7. Wit and judgment
8. The discovery of communication by verbalising subjectivity
9. The body semiotics of subjectivity as discovery of man's natural morality
10. Eighteenth-century anthropology
Part II. Writing strategies: 11. The first-person narrator
12. Interruption
13. Digression
14.Equivocation
Part III. The Play of the Text: 15. The imaginary scene
16. The games played
17. The humour.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]