Showing papers in "Novel: A Forum on Fiction in 2018"

The Global Program Era: Contemporary International Fiction in the American Creative Economy

Abstract: Over the last two decades, a curious literary phenomenon has been taking shape in the American university system. The international writer has found a stable institutional home in the American creative writing program. While the postwar creative writing program consolidated itself as a national endeavor, the master of fine arts (MFA) program in the 2000s has nurtured cultural voices that supplement the standardized American MFA voice with a distinctly global perspective. A new writerly generation has routed itself through the American university, primarily as students but also as visiting writers, lecturers, and professors. Here is a brief catalog of some prominent international novelists who have passed through the winnowing process of the creative writing program in some influential way: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie received an MFA from Johns Hopkins University; Bilal Tanweer received an MFA from Columbia University; Daniyal Mueenuddin received his writing degree from University of Arizona; Mohsin Hamid received an undergraduate degree from Princeton University, but he attended a crucial fiction writing workshop with Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates, in which he drafted his first

Mutant City: On Partial Transformations in Three Johannesburg Narratives

Abstract: This essay was written while on a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) from 2014 to 2016 and owes much to the vigorous intellectual environment fostered there by Sarah Nuttall and others. A talk by Rita Barnard, “Temporality as Narrative Infrastructure” (WiSER, May 2015), and an honors thesis by Nandi Weder, “Space in Transition: Alternative Forms of Agency and Power in Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys,” both helped to crystallize my ideas (this thesis has since become a chapter in Weder’s master’s dissertation; citations refer to the former). My special thanks to Sarah Nuttall and Nancy Armstrong for their comments on drafts of this essay.

Drone Form: Mediation at the End of Empire

Abstract: At the British Library, dispatches from the front lines of England’s merciless counterinsurgency campaign in India, 1857–58, are collected into folders marked “Miscellaneous Indian Mutiny Papers” and “India Office Records and Private Papers.” Copied on thin paper, the documents read as a perverse and staccato kind of poetry. They shape tidings of insurrection and its brutal suppression into the idiom of war-state bureaucracy. Antiseptic and technical, dehumanizing by design, this administrative jargon is further formalized during its compression into the argot of electronic telegraphy. And if compression names “the process that renders a mode of representation adequate to its infrastructures” (Sterne 35), then telegraphy of the so-called Indian Mutiny is perhaps best understood as conveying not simply the content that any given message contained, encoded, and transmitted— the movement of troops, the reports of losses, the accounts of battle—but a cipher of the war-making infrastructure of nineteenth-century imperialism.1

The Meaning of Settler Realism: (De)Mystifying Frontiers in the Postcolonial Historical Novel

Abstract: Dominant theorizations of settler colonialism identify it as a social form characterized by a problem with historical narration: because the existence of settler communities depends on the dispossession of indigenous peoples, settlers find themselves trapped by the need both to confront and to disavow these origins. How might this problem affect the aesthetics of the realist novel? This article argues that the historical novels produced in places like Australia and New Zealand constitute a distinctive variant of literary realism inflected by the ideological tensions of settler colonialism. Approaching the novel from the perspective of settler colonialism offers new ways to consider classic theories of realism and, in particular, reframes Georg Lukács's concept of reification—and the critical distinction between realism and naturalism he derived from it—as an unexpectedly useful tool for analyzing postcolonial literatures. Doing so, however, requires us to jettison Lukács's progressive historicism in favor of a model of literary history shaped by uneven temporalities and a fundamental disjunction between the historical perspectives of settler and nonsettler communities—thus complicating our narratives of the development of the novel genre. This argument is illustrated through an extended analysis of two of the most significant young novelists to engage recently with issues of settler colonial history: Eleanor Catton of New Zealand and Rohan Wilson of Australia.

Introduction: How Do Novels Think about Neoliberalism?

Abstract: The fourth biennial conference of the Society for Novel Studies was held at the University of Pittsburgh in May 2016 under the leadership of Jonathan Arac, then SNS vice president. Novel sponsored British novelist Tom McCarthy as the keynote speaker, and he agreed to let us publish both his talk and his provocative interview with Nicholas Huber. Members of the editorial board selected four additional papers from the conference that, in their view, shed new light on the relationship between the novel and neoliberalism. The remaining papers in this issue are based on invited talks from symposia held at Duke and Brown Universities that focused on the contemporary novel, critical theory, and the curious relationship these two modes of writing have taken up in the past half century. All the essays went through the journal’s standard review process. To introduce this special issue, we chose two essays that frame the largely unstated question that the collection as a whole addresses: McCarthy’s keynote talk, “Vanity’s Residue,” which leans heavily on certain novels as a mode of critical theoretical writing, and Dierdra Reber’s “ATale of Two Marats,” which leans just as heavily on the explanatory logic of political-economic theory as McCarthy does on that of novels. Together, these essays ask us to consider how major contemporary novelists have changed the novel’s “partition of the sensible . . . which,” according to Jacques Rancière, “allows (or does not allow) some data to appear” (11). Is this alteration of the reader’s formal expectations a matter of course—an expression of the generic obligation of the novel to violate the established novel form, however one construes it? Or do the formal features that distinguish novels written in the last thirty years or so alter that obligation itself? Should we consider the variations that encourage us to identify certain novels with “neoliberalism” as variations of the novel as a genre—or do they amount to a different order of difference that in turn amounts to a different set of generic requirements? If the latter, then can we say that the novels now being written for a global audience are breaking with the novel form itself and dissolving the contract, which changes those expectations— including that of the element of surprise—that readers bring to novel reading? Reber and McCarthy are of one mind that the turn in political and novel history now attributed to neoliberalism has actually been three centuries in the making. Reber begins with the concept of laissez-faire coined by the mid-eighteenthcentury Physiocrats who argued that the economy should be free of regulations to develop according to its own natural law. She shows how that principle derives energy from its opposition (“abhorrence” is her word) to a form of vertical authority that describes itself as rational. Her account holds the vertical authority of empire responsible for curbing the horizontal drive of laissez-faire until the end of the Cold War period, when neoliberalism emerged from the collapse of vertical authority. She sees Trumpery as symptomatic of this collapse: “In a cultural climate dominated by

Thresholds of the Novel: Realism, the Inhuman, the Ethical in J. M. Coetzee's Foe

Abstract: This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Duke University Press via the DOI in this record.

Allegory of the Global Anglophone: Interconnectedness and Sublimity in Cloud Atlas

Abstract: The article situates David Mitchell's imagination of planetary interconnectedness in the historical development of global English. It argues that Cloud Atlas projects a denationalized, centrifugal vision of the world, only to entrench it in a cohesive, centripetal anglophone network through fictionalized scenes of reading. The novel assigns the English text a privileged position in fostering global connections and renders its cultural other unrepresentable in order to maintain a coherent representational system over a heterolingual world. Mitchell's imagination of a textually embedded connectivity descends from an older ideology of literature-as-mediation that originated from colonial literary education.

Proust's Genies: In Search of Lost Time and Population Biology

Abstract: Whether identified as “genies,” “little men,” or simply “les moi,” a vast horde of personified mental faculties populates In Search of Lost Time, responsible for behaviors too instantaneous or too ingrained to come under conscious control. Representing automatic neural subroutines as self-interested beings allows Proust to apply the principles of biological selection to these psychological entities, imagining the mind as an ecosystem in which great personal upheavals—for instance, Marcel's loss of Albertine—figure as extinction events that wipe out large populations of narrowly specialized, slow-to-adapt “genies.” Since genies are optimized for highly specific micro-environments, the same “species” of genie may form in any two individuals who share such a micro-environment, with this indifference to the boundaries of the person making it possible for a shared genie-type to define an ad hoc social category: homosexuals, snobs, members of the Guermantes set. In this essay, I unpack Search's model of the mind as a population of simple homunculi and explore its effect on Proust's understanding of interpersonal collectives, from intellectual coteries to social classes. The construct of the genie, I suggest, not only allows Proust to suture together sub-individual and supra-individual scales of analysis but also enables a model of change—both psychological and historical—that is neither simply agentic nor simply deterministic. Rather, the shifting demographics of mental homunculi constitute a quantitative, probabilistic, and nonsychronous form of change, creating new adaptive niches while permitting the partial survival of prior forms of life.