Conclusion Sustaining a Human Image

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. This book, while drawing on Ginzburg's own theories of in-between prose, has aimed to shed light on unexpected relationships among her choice of genres, her rhetorical strategies, and her search for a so-called post-individualist self. This book has also brought to light several paradoxes attending Ginzburg's creations. The remainder of the chapter expands on a few of these paradoxes that have been only implicit until now. Ginzburg was rather skeptical about the individual writer's ability to transcend the discourses and conditions of her time—and in fact, she saw this rootedness in the present as a positive sign of the individual's connection to his or her culture. At the same time, in many ways she appears to have cultivated an alternative ethics and way of writing, strongly connected to the tradition of the intelligentsia and the literary giants of the previous century such as Tolstoy and Herzen.