Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2016"

Introduction: Worlding Realisms Now

Abstract: Realist fiction has been an object of fascinated suspicion ever since Henry James saw fit to brand George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) a “treasure-house of details” that “makes an indifferent whole” (Middlemarch 425). From George Moore to Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes to Catherine Belsey, and Fredric Jameson to Terry Eagleton, modernists, structuralists, poststructuralists, and Marxists have indicted the realist novel as the “kind of art most congenial to the ascendant bourgeoisie” (Eagleton) in doing “the work of ideology” (Belsey 60). But realist fiction—in dialogue with the realisms of photography, film, television, and other media—has lived to tell another tale. In the last decade or so a new generation of artists, historians, and literary scholars has seemed to anticipate Thomas Piketty in affirming the realist novel as an indispensable feature in the ongoing story he tells in Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century (2014). The sociologist Giovanni Arrighi has provided a compelling frame for studying the recurrence of realisms in and across longues durées. Literary criticism such as Matthew Beaumont’s Adventures in Realism (2007); Jed Esty and Colleen Lye’s Peripheral Realisms (2012); Ulka Anjaria’s Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel (2012); Jane Elliott and Gillian Harkins’s special issue of Social Text, “The Genres of Neoliberalism” (2013); Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge’s Reading Capitalist Realism (2014); and my own The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic: Realism, Sovereignty, and Transnational Experience (2015) have, in various ways, challenged the perception of realism as a bourgeois concoction programmed “to avoid recognition of deep structural social change” (Jameson, “A Note” 261). Cognizant of realism’s centuries-long plurality and vitality, scholars in various fields now hold that realist fiction, which responds to capitalist permutations across space and time, is a transnational medium shot through with aesthetic possibility. Realisms thus conceived are more radically worlded than the autarkic creatures of London and Paris that Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova theorize in their respective models of “world literature.” The essays in this special issue firmly reject the reflex to prejudge realist art as formal underachiever, discursive ruse, or nation-centric Western export. What is more, these essays question whether a realism so resurgent is the singular privilege

Reading the Book of the World: Epic Representation in the Age of Our Geophysical Agency

Abstract: The foundational text of all modern novel theory begins with a paean to astrology. “Happy are those ages when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars,” Georg Lukács declares in the opening lines of his Theory of the Novel. In such ages, “the world is wide and yet it is like a home, for the fire that burns in the soul is of the same essential nature as the stars.” Consequently, these ages do not need novels, for “each action of the soul” is “complete in meaning and complete for the senses” (29). Only with the arrival of modernity do “meaning” (Sinn) and “senses” (Sinne) become separated from one another. As evidence of this, Lukács invokes Immanuel Kant’s famous declaration that there are two different things that fill the mind with wonder: the starry sky above and the moral law within. Transcendental philosophy, as this quote reminds us, draws an insurmountable trench between the world of external sensation and the world of ideas. The novel is forever condemned to restore a lost totality to what Lukács fittingly calls a world of “transcendental homelessness” (41). In its struggles, it pines for the lost certainties of an earlier age of heavenly prognostication. A century after the publication of Theory of the Novel, Lukács’s adherence to the tenets of transcendental idealism seems more than a little quaint. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia had already given a major institutional boost to the competing doctrine of dialectical materialism, and Lukács himself would soon convert to this worldview. Most contemporary editions of his early masterpiece are prefaced by the bone-chilling recantation of it that he wrote in 1962, a few years after the Soviet army put a swift end to the Hungarian revolution. Martin Heidegger’s project of fundamental ontology, another attack on transcendental idealism, was on the horizon as well. As inspired and internally differentiated as these philosophical projects may be, however, they nevertheless preserve the fundamental conception of modernity as a period in which human subjects find themselves at odds with a natural world that can be observed, manipulated, and mastered but never truly assimilated. Twentieth-century novel criticism consequently still hews close to Lukács’s definition of the novel as a secular epic, an attempt to make sense of a world that seems inherently senseless, governed only by convention and circumstance. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 1 Indeed, it was Lukács himself who moved this conviction to the heart of modern dialectical materialism, through his reworking of the Marxist concept of alienation into a comprehensive philosophical theory of “reification.”

The Novel as the Future Anterior of the Book: Tom McCarthy's Remainder and Ali Smith's The Accidental

Abstract: This article asks what it means to consider a twenty-first-century novel as a machine able to talk about its own materiality. Is it a series of keystrokes or digital files or marks on a page? If, as Friedrich Kittler presumes, digital technology has boosted the autopoietic qualities of the media system, in what sense do paper books remain active components of this system and in what sense do they appear within it as old media, spoken for by the electronically mediated texts that represent them? Or have novels become comments on this in-between state of being no longer quite materially decipherable as paper sequences, portable objects, material containers of letters arranged on a page and yet not being fully free of this image of the book? Focusing on Tom McCarthy's Remainder (2005) and Ali Smith's The Accidental (2005) as novels that speak from what Jacques Derrida calls the “future anterior” of the page, it argues for the view of the book that opens up once a technology is no longer in use as a primary medium. By this logic, if novels like Remainder and The Accidental perform the space of new media, it is not because they describe or actively cede a role to electronic text but because they deploy a nonnative capacity to look at narrative in its incarnation as paper and print. This also means that they engage with medial form without being strictly self-referential.

Introduction: Property and heterotopia

Abstract: Aided by the critical wisdom of Novel’s editorial board, I selected the essays for this special issue from a pair of conferences sponsored by the journal. That was in truth the sole institutional connection between the two events. Challenged to organize a one-day symposium on any topic having to do with novel studies, a committee of PhD students at Duke designed such an event in response to the recently coined term Anthropocene, a coinage for the geologic period during which human activities have had global impact on earth’s ecosystems. In its letter inviting its chosen speakers for this symposium, the planning committee asked speakers to address the following questions: