Truth, time and the novel: Veridiction in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Balzac (Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russia, Honore de Balzac, France)

My dissertation outlines a poetics of novelistic truth discourse (veridiction) with reference to a late eighteenth-century crisis in the philosophical conception of truth. The crisis marks a transition from an essentially atemporal understanding of truth to one that recognizes the dependence of truth on time. Hence, a delimited poetics of veridiction examines the manner in which truth is narratively configured by particular novels.; In the first chapter I examine Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which gives voice to this new understanding of truth as ineluctably temporal. I then discuss Diderot's Rameau's Nephew, Rousseau's Confessions, Friedrich Schlegel's Atheneum Fragments and Lucinde, and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , all of which appeared in print during the period generally associated with the rise of Romanticism in Europe. These texts develop and employ influential narrative strategies for addressing the crisis of truth and thus prepare the way for the emergence of the realist novel as crucially concerned with the vicissitudes of truth in narrative.; Chapter Two analyzes Anna Karenina as containing two differently structured narratives, with a distinctive conception of truth implicit in each. One of these conceptions emerges as linked to time, so that repeated revelatory moments hinge on the formation and subsequent dissolution of Levin's conceptions of the "good life." The other veridictory mode relates to Anna's narrative and relies on modes of de-temporalization for achieving the position of outsideness from which the truth about Anna may be pronounced.; My reading of Crime and Punishment in Chapter Three highlights its status as a quasi-detective novel, fixated on the identity of the criminal. While seeking the truth about a self, the novel provides us with two models of what that truth might look like. The atemporal mode is here associated especially with the device of the accident, which translates into novelistic terms the standard kairotic moments of haigiographic narratives (such as the immediate insight of faith, illumination, miracle).; Chapter Three treats Balzac's two philosophical studies as representing the dreadful experience of absolute knowledge by collapsing the two veridictory modes onto each other. I analyze Balzac's representation of the philosopher's style in Louis Lambert and isolate the metaphor as the key tropological vehicle of truth. I then go on to consider the effect of this uninhibited veridictory metaphor on the narrative shape of the novels. What emerges in Louis Lambert is a narrative broken down into fragments, while La Peau de chagrin boldly tells the story of timelessness immanent in narrative.