Tamina at the Border

The opening chapter seeks to orient the book as a whole, discussing the relationship between philosophy and the novel both in general and in relationship to Kundera and his self-identified tradition in specific. It seeks to articulate the nature of the book’s own voice—how does one speak in and from the border at which philosophy and the novel (themselves internally contested) meet? In addition to a meditation on the problem of the border (both for Kundera and for the aims of my book), this chapter includes a case study: Plato’s Symposium and Kundera’s early novelistic variation of it (his short story, “The Symposium”).