{"product_id":"open-secrets-1","title":"Open Secrets","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eOpen Secrets\u003c\/i\u003e identifies an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action in Mme de Lafayette's \u003ci\u003eLa Princesse de Clèves\u003c\/i\u003e (1678), Jane Austen's \u003ci\u003eMansfield Park\u003c\/i\u003e (1814), and poems by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy. The author argues that these works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular that of self-concealment and self-presentation. Declining the twin pressures of self-actualization and self-denial defining modernity's call to make good on one's talents, the subjects of the \"literature of uncounted experience\" do nothing so heroic as renounce ambitions of self-expression; they simply set aside the fantasy of the all-responsible subject. The originality of \u003ci\u003eOpen Secrets\u003c\/i\u003e is thus to imagine the non-instrumental without casting it as a heavy ethical burden. Non-appropriation emerges not as what is difficult to do but as the path of least resistance. The book offers a valuable counterpoint to recent anti-Enlightenment revaluations of passivity that have made non-mastery and non-appropriation the fundamental task of the ethical subject. \u003c\/p\u003e\n","brand":"Anne-Lise François","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53614541504892,"sku":"9780804752893","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0251\/4980\/0541\/files\/9780804752893_0dc703ec-5b63-4d62-a919-a1cb80460ebb.jpg?v=1727346545","url":"https:\/\/combined-academic.myshopify.com\/products\/open-secrets-1","provider":"Combined Academic Publishers - Mare Nostrum Group","version":"1.0","type":"link"}