Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel. Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture; The Novel. Volume 2: Forms and Themes
21 Apr 2008-
About: The article was published on 2008-04-21 and is currently open access. It has received 10 citations till now.
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TL;DR: It is argued that historians of knowledge (including medical knowledge) should draw a distinction between “epistemic” and “literary” genres, and that the medical case narrative belongs to the first group, that is, those kinds of texts that develop in tandem with scientific practices.
Abstract: In this article, I argue that we should consider the medical case narrative as an “epistemic genre.” I suggest that historians of knowledge (including medical knowledge) should draw a distinction between “epistemic” and “literary” genres, and that the medical case narrative belongs to the first group, that is, those kinds of texts that develop in tandem with scientific practices. I also argue that the history of the medical case narrative should be studied in a long-term perspective. In general, the focal point of the historiography on the medical case narrative has tended to gravitate around the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with only cursory attention to earlier periods and no attempt to reconstruct the long-term lineaments of the story. I believe that this modernist focus has a very serious flaw, as it ignores the presence of a vast literature of case collections in pre-modern medicine. I believe that we need to trace the history of the medical case narrative as a genre that evolved over a very long period of time, from antiquity to modern medicine. For this purpose, I adopt the approach that literary scholar Franco Moretti has called “distant reading,” that is, a focused attention to the long duration of a genre within a culture as well as its variations across cultures.
What do we see when we look at the long-term development of the medical case narrative? Distant reading suggests, at first sight, that the genre appeared in embryonic form in antiquity, with the Hippocratic Epidemics, but also that it disappeared for long periods of time, to emerge again, in new form and with new vitality, in the late Renaissance. Most interestingly, distant reading also suggests that the evolutionary dynamic of the case narrative was closely intertwined with that of two other fundamental epistemic genres, the recipe and the commentary. Here, I examine in particular the association between case and commentary.
52 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that deep or figurative interpretive possibilities must be pursued in close connection with the facticity of fictional worlds, particularly in the case of maritime and other fiction deploying a specialized, technical lexicon.
Abstract: Surface reading and similar developments in literary study advocate a turn away from symptomatic reading toward the superficial and self-evident. Arguing for the productivity of these approaches despite the contradictory language in which they have sometimes been formulated, this essay develops a related form of analysis: literal or denotative reading. Denotative reading does not reject deep or figurative interpretive possibilities. Rather, it insists they must be pursued in close connection with the facticity of fictional worlds, particularly in the case of maritime and other fiction deploying a specialized, technical lexicon. The essay treats Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) as an exemplary instance of such fiction, contending that its precise articulation of tidal currents, nautical maneuvers, and ship design signals the key role of “restraint” not only in this novella but throughout Conrad’s corpus.
22 citations
Dissertation•
28 Feb 2013
TL;DR: In this article, the structural and contextual configuration of three books by Orhan Pamuk: The White Castle, My Name is Red and Istanbul: Memories of a City are discussed.
Abstract: This study aims to discuss the structural and contextual configuration of three books by Orhan Pamuk: The White Castle, My Name is Red and Istanbul: Memories of a City. The central line of enquiry will be the possibility of representing identity as the attempt to capture the elements that make the ‘self’ what it is. Without limiting my analysis to an individual or national definition of identity, I will argue that Pamuk, writing through the various metaphysical binaries including self/other, East/West, word/image, reality/fiction, and original/imitation, offers an alternative view of identity resulting from the definition of representation as differance. I will argue that within the framework of Pamuk’s work representation, far from offering a comforting resolution, is a space governed by ambivalence that results from the fluctuations of meaning. Representation, for Pamuk, is only possible as a process of constant displacement that enables meaning through difference and deferral. Accordingly the representation of identity is no longer limited to the binaries of the metaphysical tradition, which operate within firm boundaries, but manifests itself in constant fluctuation as ambivalence. Within this framework I will suggest that Pamuk’s works operate in that space of ambivalence, undermining the firm grounds of metaphysics by perpetually displacing any possibility of closure. Initially focusing on the self/other dichotomy I will argue that the representations of the ‘self’ are its reinventions through difference and deferral thus representing it as ‘an-other’. Using the theoretical framework offered by the writings of Jacques Derrida I will study the various textual and stylistic strategies that Pamuk uses in the his books to enable the representation of identity as differance.
13 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Seccombe argues that the importance of Smollett's work has been overlooked and that its effect on his successors is largely overlooked, and he points out that the fragments of a novel's corpus have gone unrecognized or been misidentified.
Abstract: Of the five great eighteenth-century novelists, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, Smollett is now valued the least; yet in the influence he has exercised upon successors he is approached by Sterne alone of his contemporaries. The tide of subsequent fictitious literature is strewn on every hand with the disjecta membra of 'Peregrine Pickle/ of 'Count Fathom/ and 'Humphry Clinker.'- Thomas Seccombe, "Smollett," Dictionary of National Biography (1889)My title alludes to Thomas Seccombe's charge that Tobias Smollett's impact on the history of the novel has been underestimated, but the phrase "disjecta membra" derives from Horace's Satire 1.4, in which Horace seems to praise Ennius by suggesting that, even were the words of his poems rearranged, you would still discern the scattered limbs of a poet: "invenias etiam disiecti membra poetae."1 Seccombe insists that Smollett's influence on subsequent fiction was widespread, yet he acknowledges that Smollett's work has fallen into disregard and that its effect on his successors is largely overlooked. Unlike Ennius's disarticulated members, then, the fragments of Smollett's corpus have gone unrecognized or been misidentified. Indeed, despite his manifest popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Smollett's place in the history of English fiction remains, like Humpty Dumpty, hard to piece together. He barely figures in some of the most influential studies of the "rise of the novel" in English, perhaps because of what Deidre Lynch calls "[mjodern readers' difficulties in positioning Smollett's fiction in relation to notions of 'the' novel."2 Thus, though the University of Georgia Press has published a fresh scholarly edition of Smollett's works, and though some excellent books and chapters devoted to Smollett have appeared in recent years, he remains an outlier among the handful or two of eighteenth-century fiction writers usually counted as major.3In the pages that follow, I want to ramify and extend Seccombe's application of the Horatian metaphor, disjecta membra, to Smollett's fiction. By demonstrating how aptly the phrase denotes various aspects of his achievement as a fiction writer - characters that shiver into assemblages of quirky attributes, a thematic emphasis on fragmented bodies and fungible identities, paratactic plots that fracture into a patchwork of episodes, entire works that juxtapose the styles and conventions of fictional genres usually considered discrete, and an oeuvre almost without parallel in the eighteenth century in its diverse experiments with point of view - I hope to indicate the ways in which many accounts of the novel as a genre have done a disservice to Smollett, and by extension to a range of crazy-quilt fictions published between roughly 1750 and 1800. Though it has become customary to conceive of the novel as achieving a coherence, an identity, an integral generic body by the midpoint of the eighteenth century, it is perhaps time to acknowledge eighteenth-century fictions as so many scattered limbs and to recognize the productions of Smollett and his contemporaries not as deviations from an established norm, not as popular or minor works that are to be distinguished from the main tradition of literary fiction, but as exemplary of the state of the novel in the period. Taking Smollett seriously entails that we regard with suspicion studies of the eighteenth-century novel that read like a bildungsroman. It demands that we reconsider stock assumptions about the novel's organic unity and concede that, like the emerging genre in which they participate, many early fictions are mixtures of separable, recombinable, Legolike components. In Smollett's hands, "the" novel falls to pieces.HOLDING RANDOM TOGETHERAs Jerry Beasley notes, "Smollett was very little interested in the consolidation of forms. It was their multiplicity that appealed to him."4 Nonetheless, even Smollett would seem to have felt some concern about holding novels together. …
13 citations
TL;DR: Coetzee as discussed by the authors pointed to the 17th-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, as one important literary predecessor of the contemporary South African writer J.M. Coetzee, a relation that has generally passed unnoticed among critics.
Abstract: SummaryThis article points to the 17th-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, as one important literary predecessor of the contemporary South African writer, J.M. Coetzee, a relation that has generally passed unnoticed among critics. This relation is brought to the foreground in Coetzee’s most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), but it also underlies his previous ones, Age of Iron (1998), Disgrace (2000), and Slow Man (2005), as well as his critical pieces, “The Novel Today” (1988) and the “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1992b), all of which contain echoes of Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote ([1605, 1615]2005). My argument is that the conflict between imagination and reality, the novel and history, central in Coetzee’s fictional and non-fictional production, needs to be re-examined as a fundamentally Cervantine one. The adventures and fate of Don Quixote lie behind Coetzee’s exploration of whether literature may be an effective and ethical guide in our dealings with reality, whethe...
13 citations
References
More filters
TL;DR: It is argued that historians of knowledge (including medical knowledge) should draw a distinction between “epistemic” and “literary” genres, and that the medical case narrative belongs to the first group, that is, those kinds of texts that develop in tandem with scientific practices.
Abstract: In this article, I argue that we should consider the medical case narrative as an “epistemic genre.” I suggest that historians of knowledge (including medical knowledge) should draw a distinction between “epistemic” and “literary” genres, and that the medical case narrative belongs to the first group, that is, those kinds of texts that develop in tandem with scientific practices. I also argue that the history of the medical case narrative should be studied in a long-term perspective. In general, the focal point of the historiography on the medical case narrative has tended to gravitate around the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with only cursory attention to earlier periods and no attempt to reconstruct the long-term lineaments of the story. I believe that this modernist focus has a very serious flaw, as it ignores the presence of a vast literature of case collections in pre-modern medicine. I believe that we need to trace the history of the medical case narrative as a genre that evolved over a very long period of time, from antiquity to modern medicine. For this purpose, I adopt the approach that literary scholar Franco Moretti has called “distant reading,” that is, a focused attention to the long duration of a genre within a culture as well as its variations across cultures.
What do we see when we look at the long-term development of the medical case narrative? Distant reading suggests, at first sight, that the genre appeared in embryonic form in antiquity, with the Hippocratic Epidemics, but also that it disappeared for long periods of time, to emerge again, in new form and with new vitality, in the late Renaissance. Most interestingly, distant reading also suggests that the evolutionary dynamic of the case narrative was closely intertwined with that of two other fundamental epistemic genres, the recipe and the commentary. Here, I examine in particular the association between case and commentary.
52 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that deep or figurative interpretive possibilities must be pursued in close connection with the facticity of fictional worlds, particularly in the case of maritime and other fiction deploying a specialized, technical lexicon.
Abstract: Surface reading and similar developments in literary study advocate a turn away from symptomatic reading toward the superficial and self-evident. Arguing for the productivity of these approaches despite the contradictory language in which they have sometimes been formulated, this essay develops a related form of analysis: literal or denotative reading. Denotative reading does not reject deep or figurative interpretive possibilities. Rather, it insists they must be pursued in close connection with the facticity of fictional worlds, particularly in the case of maritime and other fiction deploying a specialized, technical lexicon. The essay treats Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) as an exemplary instance of such fiction, contending that its precise articulation of tidal currents, nautical maneuvers, and ship design signals the key role of “restraint” not only in this novella but throughout Conrad’s corpus.
22 citations
Dissertation•
28 Feb 2013
TL;DR: In this article, the structural and contextual configuration of three books by Orhan Pamuk: The White Castle, My Name is Red and Istanbul: Memories of a City are discussed.
Abstract: This study aims to discuss the structural and contextual configuration of three books by Orhan Pamuk: The White Castle, My Name is Red and Istanbul: Memories of a City. The central line of enquiry will be the possibility of representing identity as the attempt to capture the elements that make the ‘self’ what it is. Without limiting my analysis to an individual or national definition of identity, I will argue that Pamuk, writing through the various metaphysical binaries including self/other, East/West, word/image, reality/fiction, and original/imitation, offers an alternative view of identity resulting from the definition of representation as differance. I will argue that within the framework of Pamuk’s work representation, far from offering a comforting resolution, is a space governed by ambivalence that results from the fluctuations of meaning. Representation, for Pamuk, is only possible as a process of constant displacement that enables meaning through difference and deferral. Accordingly the representation of identity is no longer limited to the binaries of the metaphysical tradition, which operate within firm boundaries, but manifests itself in constant fluctuation as ambivalence. Within this framework I will suggest that Pamuk’s works operate in that space of ambivalence, undermining the firm grounds of metaphysics by perpetually displacing any possibility of closure. Initially focusing on the self/other dichotomy I will argue that the representations of the ‘self’ are its reinventions through difference and deferral thus representing it as ‘an-other’. Using the theoretical framework offered by the writings of Jacques Derrida I will study the various textual and stylistic strategies that Pamuk uses in the his books to enable the representation of identity as differance.
13 citations
TL;DR: In this article, Seccombe argues that the importance of Smollett's work has been overlooked and that its effect on his successors is largely overlooked, and he points out that the fragments of a novel's corpus have gone unrecognized or been misidentified.
Abstract: Of the five great eighteenth-century novelists, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, Smollett is now valued the least; yet in the influence he has exercised upon successors he is approached by Sterne alone of his contemporaries. The tide of subsequent fictitious literature is strewn on every hand with the disjecta membra of 'Peregrine Pickle/ of 'Count Fathom/ and 'Humphry Clinker.'- Thomas Seccombe, "Smollett," Dictionary of National Biography (1889)My title alludes to Thomas Seccombe's charge that Tobias Smollett's impact on the history of the novel has been underestimated, but the phrase "disjecta membra" derives from Horace's Satire 1.4, in which Horace seems to praise Ennius by suggesting that, even were the words of his poems rearranged, you would still discern the scattered limbs of a poet: "invenias etiam disiecti membra poetae."1 Seccombe insists that Smollett's influence on subsequent fiction was widespread, yet he acknowledges that Smollett's work has fallen into disregard and that its effect on his successors is largely overlooked. Unlike Ennius's disarticulated members, then, the fragments of Smollett's corpus have gone unrecognized or been misidentified. Indeed, despite his manifest popularity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Smollett's place in the history of English fiction remains, like Humpty Dumpty, hard to piece together. He barely figures in some of the most influential studies of the "rise of the novel" in English, perhaps because of what Deidre Lynch calls "[mjodern readers' difficulties in positioning Smollett's fiction in relation to notions of 'the' novel."2 Thus, though the University of Georgia Press has published a fresh scholarly edition of Smollett's works, and though some excellent books and chapters devoted to Smollett have appeared in recent years, he remains an outlier among the handful or two of eighteenth-century fiction writers usually counted as major.3In the pages that follow, I want to ramify and extend Seccombe's application of the Horatian metaphor, disjecta membra, to Smollett's fiction. By demonstrating how aptly the phrase denotes various aspects of his achievement as a fiction writer - characters that shiver into assemblages of quirky attributes, a thematic emphasis on fragmented bodies and fungible identities, paratactic plots that fracture into a patchwork of episodes, entire works that juxtapose the styles and conventions of fictional genres usually considered discrete, and an oeuvre almost without parallel in the eighteenth century in its diverse experiments with point of view - I hope to indicate the ways in which many accounts of the novel as a genre have done a disservice to Smollett, and by extension to a range of crazy-quilt fictions published between roughly 1750 and 1800. Though it has become customary to conceive of the novel as achieving a coherence, an identity, an integral generic body by the midpoint of the eighteenth century, it is perhaps time to acknowledge eighteenth-century fictions as so many scattered limbs and to recognize the productions of Smollett and his contemporaries not as deviations from an established norm, not as popular or minor works that are to be distinguished from the main tradition of literary fiction, but as exemplary of the state of the novel in the period. Taking Smollett seriously entails that we regard with suspicion studies of the eighteenth-century novel that read like a bildungsroman. It demands that we reconsider stock assumptions about the novel's organic unity and concede that, like the emerging genre in which they participate, many early fictions are mixtures of separable, recombinable, Legolike components. In Smollett's hands, "the" novel falls to pieces.HOLDING RANDOM TOGETHERAs Jerry Beasley notes, "Smollett was very little interested in the consolidation of forms. It was their multiplicity that appealed to him."4 Nonetheless, even Smollett would seem to have felt some concern about holding novels together. …
13 citations
TL;DR: Coetzee as discussed by the authors pointed to the 17th-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, as one important literary predecessor of the contemporary South African writer J.M. Coetzee, a relation that has generally passed unnoticed among critics.
Abstract: SummaryThis article points to the 17th-century Spanish writer, Miguel de Cervantes, as one important literary predecessor of the contemporary South African writer, J.M. Coetzee, a relation that has generally passed unnoticed among critics. This relation is brought to the foreground in Coetzee’s most recent novel, The Childhood of Jesus (2013), but it also underlies his previous ones, Age of Iron (1998), Disgrace (2000), and Slow Man (2005), as well as his critical pieces, “The Novel Today” (1988) and the “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech” (1992b), all of which contain echoes of Cervantes’s masterpiece, Don Quixote ([1605, 1615]2005). My argument is that the conflict between imagination and reality, the novel and history, central in Coetzee’s fictional and non-fictional production, needs to be re-examined as a fundamentally Cervantine one. The adventures and fate of Don Quixote lie behind Coetzee’s exploration of whether literature may be an effective and ethical guide in our dealings with reality, whethe...
13 citations