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Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900
01 Jan 1998-
TL;DR: Moretti as mentioned in this paper explored the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel and found that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history, in a series of one hundred maps, alongside Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas.
Abstract: In a series of one hundred maps, Franco Moretti explores the fictionalization of geography in the nineteenth-century novel. Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London and Scott's Scottish Lowlands are mapped, alongside the territories of Spanish picaresque novels, African colonial romances and Russian novels of ideas, in a path-breaking study which suggests that space may well be the secret protagonist of cultural history.
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TL;DR: For instance, the authors argues that the modern novel can imply a kind of irresistible submission of the novel's narrative modes to capitalist modernity's newer informational forms, often it does so by interpolating its definitive (nonliterary) discourses of abstraction, both inside and outside the traditionally determined borders of the "West."
Abstract: ion are less a flight from reality and more an index of the (terribly concrete) various social forms of real abstraction constitutive of the (sensuously) unrepre sentable totality of modernity itself. In its most radical form, something like the later prose works of Beckett?no longer, perhaps, quite novels, but unthinkable without the novel nonetheless?would be emblematic here, thinking, for instance, of Comment C'est's world of undeviating organization and systematized violence, a textual world that is in some sense no more abstract than those social relations of the sociohistorical world it apparently divorces itself from: relations of, say, administration, information, knowledge and power, the formality of the law, and commodity exchange (see Cunningham^ "We have our being"). Yet this should not be misunderstood. Despite, for example, Adorno's more apocalyptic pronounce ments, capitalism as a social form is never reducible to the more or less "purely" abstract social relations determined by capital and the value form alone. Indeed, capitalism positively requires other forms of social relation as concrete forms that can be reworked and ref unctioned in the drive to capital accumulation. One might say much the same about the novel's necessary overdetermination of the "forlorn particulars" essential to its materialization (Adorno, "Trying to Understand" 252). It is the dialectic of abstraction and concretion unique to each work?the vari able points at which a "concretism," as Adorno puts it, "passes directly into the most extreme abstraction" (250-51)?that on this reading marks its own negotia This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 05:50:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 316 NOVEL I SUMMER 2009 tion with the sociohistorical reality of capitalism it confronts and that should thus provide one key site of critical judgment and reflection. It is in these terms that the "story" of modernity that The Theory of the Novel has to tell, then, may surely also be tied, without too much strain, to what Marx defines in the Manifesto as the immanent logic of capitalism itself, a momentum of abstractivization in which, famously, "all that is solid melts into air"?though this has crucially proved to be a far less totalizing process than Marx himself imag ined. At any rate, it is arguably the social forms that such a dynamic generates that each novel has always confronted as its specifically modern reality. Certainly it would be key to any thinking through of what Moretti has called the "unstable formations" and "paradoxical fusions" engendered by the novel's current wave of internationalization (Atlas 194), following, as it does, those socioeconomic pro cesses through which noncapitalist and previously colonial cultures are progres sively integrated into the accumulative structures of a transnational capitalism, with its concomitant and now globally extended forms of real abstraction, both inside and outside the traditionally determined borders of the "West." Culturally, for the novel, this perhaps returns us to the situation already set out by Benjamin in which he saw the novel, which had once deposed the story as a "present force," being itself displaced by a "new form of communication" characterized by the newspaper (as today by television and the Internet): a form he called "informa tion." Yet Benjamin himself perhaps underestimated the novel's ongoing capacity to live off of, and indeed thrive on, the very crisis this would seem to produce. For if the modern novel can imply a kind of irresistible submission of the novel's narrative modes to capitalist modernity's newer informational forms, often it does so by interpolating its definitive (nonliterary) discourses of abstraction?of adver tising copy, journalism, pornography, or technical jargon?into the very fabric of the novel as the condition of its social contemporaneity (see Cunningham, "After Adorno" 199). In "the created reality" of the novel, the "entire structure" of which can be based only in "abstract syst?matisation," Luk?cs writes, what "becomes visible is the dis tance separating the syst?matisation from concrete life" (Theory 70). Yet rather than bemoaning this, one might instead see such visibility?its capacity to render vis ible such distance?as in fact precisely the novel's distinctively modern strength, making apparent the irresolvable gap between the forms of abstraction intrinsic to modern social being and what Hegel called the "unendingly particular" with which the novel has historically been most persistently associated. The dialectic without synthesis between its abstract and concrete tendencies is, on this reading, the very condition of the modernity of the novel as such. For capitalist modernity really is "a social world constituted through abstraction to a hitherto unthink able extent" (Osborne 18). Very abstract and terribly concrete at the same time, the novel can be no less so than that sociohistorical reality of modern culture that it has always confronted. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 05:50:56 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CUNNINGHAM | CAPITALISM AND THEORY OF THE NOVEL 317
8 citations
06 Mar 2007
8 citations
8 citations
TL;DR: Goethe is central to the theorization of world literature in the age of postmodern globalization as mentioned in this paper, and the linkage between Goethe and world literature is so robust in current criticism that it may well foreclose alternative perspectives on the writer, other worlds, and heterogeneous literatures.
Abstract: Arguably the most prominent national writer of German literature, Johann Wolfgang Goethe is central to the theorization of world literature in the age of postmodern globalization. The linkage between Goethe and world literature is so robust in current criticism that it may well foreclose alternative perspectives on the writer, other worlds, and heterogeneous literatures. This special issue therefore seeks to complicate and to rethink the ties between a multiplicity of literary and cultural worlds and the imposing figure of a writer who has been used to shape our understanding of these categories. Our contributors enrich the argument around these key terms for post-national literary and cultural studies without routinizing their conjunction. We aim to recapture the present moment of world literature and reorient existing assumptions toward multiple pasts, multiple worlds, multiple literatures, and multiple Goethes. It is remarkable that observations made in the provincial Weimar of the 1820s still inspire global theorizing in the present. This collection understands Goethe as a literary, intellectual, and historical persona that inflects a broad set of continuing debates. Indeed, the effort of connecting Goethe to world literature also belongs to the longue durée of the making of different Goethes from the early 1800s to date. In the ensuing pages, we will first offer an overview of Goethe’s relationship to world literature from the early nineteenth to the twentieth century. Then, we will briefly discuss the reception or the making of Goethe in the nineteenth century, the Nazi period, and the postwar era. These two parts supplement each other in that they allow us to see how the entanglements between Goethe and world literature are part of the reception and the making of Goethe in the last two centuries and, at the same time, how the making of Goethe has transformed the discourse of Goethe and world literature. The mutuality between these two areas multiplies worlds and literatures, only a small fraction of which we can address in this issue.
8 citations
01 Oct 2020
TL;DR: The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad as discussed by the authors studied the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project.
Abstract: The Geography of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad This article charts the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 digitized novels). The main discoveries that our distant reading of the geography in these novels revealed are that the planet is covered in the Romanian novel during the period in genre fiction (that has mentions of cities from Africa, Asia and South America), not in modernist highbrow literature, and that the dominance of Paris and Rome as spaces where the action takes place is atomized during this period by smaller cities in France and Italy. The article also describes the relation between social mobility and geographical coverage in the epoch. Keywords: Romanian literature, distant reading, geocriticism, literary geography, planetarity.
8 citations