Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2014"

Reassembling the Novel: Kinlessness and the Novel of the Haitian Revolution

Abstract: If the novel is democratic, it is so because of its capacity to link the experience of the individual to the collectivity of the ‘‘demos.’’ The democratic novel, one might say, enacts a scene of mutual recognition in which the novelistic individual gains subjectivity by way of becoming a member of the people of a nation or state: the subject recognizes the nation as its own; the nation recognizes the subject as its own. Theories of the novel have placed a great deal of emphasis on the way in which the genre enables the emergence of a newly individuated, modern subject in the eighteenth century; but this subject has also primarily existed—whether implicitly or explicitly across various theories of the novel—as framed (held, made legible as a subject) by the horizon of the nation. In this essay, however, I begin by asserting that a geography of nationalism is, in fact, insufficient for accounting for the complexity of the formation not just of the subject but of the demos in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The familiar story of nation and novel, and the democratic Bildung embedded therein, erases the colony from the map of the eighteenth century. As I suggest in what follows, not only might we want to include the colony in our account of the origins of the eighteenth-century novel, but we might, further, grant the colony a central role in that account. Indeed, I argue that we might productively view eighteenth-century Atlantic colonial geographies as constitutive of the novel as a genre rather than as marginal, dilatory, or inessential. This is in part a geographic claim—one that asks that we shift our spatial understanding of the history of the novel. But it is also a claim concerning aesthetics and politics: in the eighteenth century it is the demos—the collectivity and the geography of that collectivity, the defining of a people—that requires constituting by way of the genre of the novel as much as it is the novelistic subject. Moreover, turned in that light, the genre of the novel can be seen as one that marshals aesthetic resources toward generating horizontal collectivities (democratic structures, for instance) that are distinct from, and in tension with, vertically oriented genealogical kinship structures. In this essay, then, I argue that the aesthetics at play in the novel as a genre are instrumental in creating and defining the demos and its limits; moreover, it is precisely at

Writing, Repetition, Displacement: An Interview with Jacques Rancière

Abstract: In this interview, Jacques Ranciere clarifies a number of the central concepts and underlying polemics that run throughout his considerable body of work. Touching on key aspects of his intellectual formation, including his experience teaching at the University of Vincennes in Saint-Denis in the wake of May 1968 and his pivotal research in worker's archives, Ranciere also reflects on the intimate relation between his critical project—above all its affirmation of axiomatic equality—and the development of his singular writing style.

Introduction: Is the Novel Democratic?

Abstract: In a February 2000 letter to the novelist Martin Amis, Saul Bellow wrote: ‘‘I long ago understood that what we call the art of fiction was withering because—well, because modern democracies were unheroic’’ (548). I note this not to consider the meaning of Bellow’s statement but to point out that both novelists and novel scholars have associated the novel with democracy and democracy with the novel. This perceived relationship, although provocative, has further complicated the meanings of both of its already complex terms. The question has to be asked: if we are uncertain about the semantics of our key terms, democracy and the novel, how is it possible to assess the nature of their association? Questions beget questions: what are the criteria for identifying and evaluating evidence for this relationship in order to establish its legitimacy? What is the nature of the gravitational pull that keeps these enormous abstractions, democracy and the novel, orbiting one another? Is it historical, formal, discursive, ideological, structural, metaphorical, or some combination of these, depending on the inclinations, methodologies, and disciplinary field(s) of the analyst? Does the association of democracy and the novel, no matter what formal changes each undergoes, suggest a shared origin and evolution? Would the rationale for assuming a common origin and evolution then require us to theorize a shared logic or ethic, perhaps linked to the centrality of representation— the assertion of a relationship between the actual and the virtual—for both the democratic and the novelistic? Would the discovery of a logic or ethic common to both democracy and the novel help us discern that set of variables—structural, formal, figurative—which underwrites both so that we are better able to survey their common ground? Or, conversely, would we find that there is no limit to the idiosyncratic scenarios each generates, so that any legitimate theory of a shared logic or ethic would have to accommodate infinite content and an uncontainable fluidity of form? In that case, would any association of democracy and the novel be tautological, as each of the constitutive terms loses its specificity? And if we manage persuasively to repudiate that conclusion while conceding the necessarily tentative nature of these questions and their answers, how are we to imagine the dynamics of democracy and of the novel as they move from local to national and then global sites of conceptualization, production, and reception? These were some of the questions addressed at the April 2012 conference held at Stanford’s Center for the Study of the Novel, titled ‘‘Is the Novel Democratic?’’

Introduction: Jacques Rancière and the Novel

Abstract: Jacques Rancière has long been recognized as one of the most important philosophers currently working on questions of aesthetics. His writing has reverberated widely, both geographically and across the disciplines, taking in political theory, the philosophy of work and labor, film, literature, contemporary painting, and photography. Over the past decade his work has undertaken a sustained, multidisciplinary (or transdisciplinary) reflection on the politics of aesthetics. This intervention has achieved nothing less than a reconfiguration of the relations between ideology and pedagogy, the formation of the disciplines, and the politics of artistic production and reception. The power of this reconfiguration is apparent in almost every reading of Rancière, for I am liable to find my own private convictions, personal discoveries, cherished methods, and ways of proceeding reflected back to me in his work, newly exposed as an element within a particular ‘‘distribution of the sensible,’’ in Rancière’s influential phrase. At the beginning of his book The Politics of Literature, Rancière characterizes the literary regime—the distinct formation that, around the turn of the nineteenth century, introduced a redistribution of the sensible to the European aesthetic tradition—as ‘‘a relationship between three things’’: