Exposed intimacies: the typographic era, introspection, sincerity, and the novel

Abstract

The present paper intends to explore the relationships between the emergence of the modern novel, the shift of consciousness promoted by the transformation of a lecto-oral culture into a typographic one, commented upon by Walter Ong, and the rise of the concept of sincerity as a moral value, as described by the work of Lionel Trilling. It remarks on how the value given to sincerity derives from the development of a bourgeois society based on the separation between the public sphere (hostile and marked by the dissimulation of social life) and a private world, understood as a sanctuary and refuge, making it a perfect place not only for the solitary habit of reading novels, but also for promoting introspection. The creation of characters given a complex interior life, such as those that begin to fill the novels of the 18th and 19th century, who keep close contact with the reader, while exposing a certain privacy that didn't even exist as a concept not long before then, is an innovation that derives from such a context, at the same it reinforces it as it leads readers to reflect upon their own life experiences.