Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Studies - Judit Ágnes Kádár: A Possible Application of Philosophy in the Study of Recent American Fiction

JUDIT ÁGNES KÁDÁR A POSSIBLE APPLICATION OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE STUDY OF RECENT AMERICAN FICTION Zoom 1.:Philosophy in the 'Age oflndetermanence'. We have gone too far in science, in technology, in philosophy and in political theory for many new syntheses remotely like the old. It is not absolute meaning we seek any more, but how to live at peace with ourselves and with the universe. (Davis 26) When reading, analyzing and teaching contemporary literature and recent American fiction in particular, a specific approach to philosophy is indispensable to be developed. As philosophers like Michael Foucault and Arnold Toynbee claimed, we experience the end of Modern Western Man and are entering the Postmodern Age, the Age of Indeterminacy in Ihab Hassan's words, when man is "increasingly unable to anchor itself to any universal ground of justice, truth or reason (Hutcheon 8)." The dominant feeling and mood of man at the end of the 20th century is uncertainty for the reasons Fred Alan Wolf summarized as follows: "We pay a large price for a material world. The price involves our sanity. We cannot make total order of our observations. There always appears to be something missing. This disruption of God's order appears to us as the Principle of Uncertainty (61)." Uncertainty dwells at the core of all philosophical investigations today, since the certainty of 'cogito ergo sum' had got lost and only the truth of 'cogito ergo' remained besides the ultimate certainty of the paradoxical knowledge of uncertainty, quoting Milan Kundéra (2). Literature and philosophy can hardly provide comforting points of 43