Download or read book Commiserating with Devastated Things written by Jason M. Wirth and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commiserating with Devastated Things seeks to understand the place Milan Kundera calls “the universe of the novel.” Working through Kundera’s oeuvre as well as the continental philosophical tradition, Wirth argues that Kundera transforms—not applies—philosophical reflection within literature. Reading between Kundera’s work and his self-avowed tradition, from Kafka to Hermann Broch, Wirth asks what it might mean to insist that philosophy does not have a monopoly on wisdom, that the novel has its own modes of wisdom that challenge philosophy’s.