Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0002
Jed Rasula
Cervantes’s Don Quixote is commonly accorded a foundational role in the history of the novel. Yet this inaugural gesture casts a paradoxical shadow on subsequent novels, inasmuch as it rebukes as aberrant the pleasure of indulging in novel-reading. Don Quixote brands later novels as quixotic in their generic hybridity, which can be traced to Don Quixote itself. It both is and is not a novel, setting the precedent for the novel as a genre endlessly in quest of exceptions to itself as genre—or, in the commercial context in which it has thrived, as generic. This chapter consolidates a torrent of pronouncements and observations on Don Quixote by scholars and writers which, taken collectively, reveal a kind of choral unanimity in the bewitchment to which they attest.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0009
Jed Rasula
In the fall of 2018 the British press went into a tizzy over the revelation that the committee for the Man Booker Prize was considering a book of narrative poetry, The Long Take by Scottish writer Robin Robertson. “This year’s best novel might just be a poem, according to the Booker judges, who have shortlisted one for the first time,” reported Tristram Saunders in ...
2018年秋天，有消息称布克奖委员会正在考虑出版一本叙事诗，苏格兰作家罗宾·罗伯逊(Robin Robertson)的《长篇大论》(the Long Take)，这让英国媒体一片哗然。“今年的最佳小说可能只是一首诗，根据布克奖评委的说法，这是他们第一次将一首诗列入候选名单，”崔斯特拉姆·桑德斯在……
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0007
Jed Rasula
The two subjects of this chapter are writers of German who did not live in Germany: Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald (a self-proclaimed devotee of Kafka). Kafka’s fiction has achieved the distinction of having generated a category that far exceeds its literary basis: the “Kafkaesque.” Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical investigations of literature in its ontological foundation is consistently worked out with reference to Kafka, under the telling phrase “literature and the right to death.” Perspectives by other theorists (Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Calasso) help refine Blanchot’s case, revealing that the “seasickness on dry land” of Kafka’s work takes on a life of its own apart from any particular work—precisely enabling the Kafkaesque to escape or exceed the thematic parameters articulated by the writer Kafka. Sebald then become the carrier of this viral affliction, portraying himself in peregrinations that hover indeterminately amidst various genres, from the premodern anatomy to the postmodern essayism evident in his Rings of Saturn. Sebald, like so many before him, finds that the engagement with history (World War Two and the Holocaust in his case) can only be truly undertaken by fictive means.
{"title":"Ruminant Curiosity","authors":"Jed Rasula","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The two subjects of this chapter are writers of German who did not live in Germany: Franz Kafka and W. G. Sebald (a self-proclaimed devotee of Kafka). Kafka’s fiction has achieved the distinction of having generated a category that far exceeds its literary basis: the “Kafkaesque.” Maurice Blanchot’s theoretical investigations of literature in its ontological foundation is consistently worked out with reference to Kafka, under the telling phrase “literature and the right to death.” Perspectives by other theorists (Adorno, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Calasso) help refine Blanchot’s case, revealing that the “seasickness on dry land” of Kafka’s work takes on a life of its own apart from any particular work—precisely enabling the Kafkaesque to escape or exceed the thematic parameters articulated by the writer Kafka. Sebald then become the carrier of this viral affliction, portraying himself in peregrinations that hover indeterminately amidst various genres, from the premodern anatomy to the postmodern essayism evident in his Rings of Saturn. Sebald, like so many before him, finds that the engagement with history (World War Two and the Holocaust in his case) can only be truly undertaken by fictive means.","PeriodicalId":396853,"journal":{"name":"Genre and Extravagance in the Novel","volume":"100 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115740603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0008
Jed Rasula
The concluding chapter addresses ways in which the novel as genre has provoked and stimulated cognate activities outside its normative parameters as literary genre. These are registered most recently in the exorbitant rise of the “graphic novel.” This chapter goes back more than half a century to an earlier graphic format, the comic book, particularly the transformational treatment of novels in the Classics Illustrated publishing series from 1941 into the 1960s. The focus is on debates about mass culture in the Cold War setting of congressional committee investigations of juvenile delinquency and the comic book craze. A conspicuous feature of cultural preoccupations was with the status of the classic, on the one hand (epitomized in the Great Books publishing enterprise), and lowbrow dissemination of existing “classics” in comic book format. A full-scale assault on comics by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham was instrumental in chastening the industry into self-censorship. Ironically, the pedagogic claims behind Classics Illustrated were highlighted as a threat to the supposedly innocent “mind of the child,” revealing an abiding split between the cultural eminence accorded the classic and the aptitude of the target audience. The audience as consumer had been the commercial engine behind the rise of the novel, but the specter of the innocent child now conflated cultural symbolism with political agendas. We’ve inherited the trauma of that moment in the form of “political correctness” and “cancel culture,” with old (and new) novels continuing to be singled out as affronts to public decency, malignant records of bygone traumas, or obstreperous reminders of an imaginative fertility in the human imagination that won’t go away.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0001
Jed Rasula
This chapter outlines the theme running through the book as a whole: hybrid form and extravagant execution of narrative designs have accompanied the novel throughout its history. The canonical “great novels” have therefore been exceptions to any presumed rule that would define the parameters of the novel as genre. These exceptions equivocate between history and fiction, fantasy and reality, and by so doing establish the sui generis as a paradoxically normative venture within the literary domain of the novel. As a relatively late development in literary history, the novel lacks the defining parameters set out for other genres in antiquity. It has therefore thrived by assimilating material from any and all other genres, blending them into hybrid examples that become canonical by being unrepeatable.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0005
Jed Rasula
The modern turn to psychological inwardness in the novel has often been discussed with reference to William James’s phrase, “vessel of consciousness.” Much of this chapter concerns his brother, Henry James, and his theorization of perspectivally delimited states of consciousness as a primary medium for the novel. James’s theories make a point of gendering this delimitation, claiming that female consciousness, historically constrained by lack of access to masculine vocations, actually possesses an awareness of the world advantageously enlarged by the exercise of imagination. James’s theory is placed against the backdrop of the novel’s gradual turn from epistemological to psychological veracity, from chronicling the material and social world to anatomizing the vicissitudes of consciousness as such—a transition from “character” to “psychology,” a transition made evident in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black. Once the twentieth-century novel establishes the vessel of consciousness as a primary component of its generic toolkit, the fragility of the vessel became apparent, and a technical gain in verisimilitude (refinement of character psychology) turned out to be discordant with the generically contracted principle of reality in previous fiction. The vessel of consciousness could no longer be confined to the novel itself, but became contingent on the participatory immersion of the reader’s consciousness as well.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0004
Jed Rasula
Joseph Conrad’s novel Nostromo is the focus of this chapter. Hailed as its author’s most comprehensive effort at historic panorama, epic in scale, Nostromo also (if somewhat surreptitiously) engages the diminutive form of fairy tale. Combining epic with fairy tale provides the perplexing indeterminacy many readers detect, which is often attributed to Conrad’s literary impressionism. What he reveals, however, is that even the supposedly factual enterprise of history is subject to the vicissitudes commonly accorded “creative” (thus fictive) literary forms like epic, lyric, and fairy tale. History and myth emerge from Nostromo as helpless collaborators in the hybrid fabrications of modern fiction.
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Pub Date : 2021-07-15DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192897763.003.0006
Jed Rasula
Increased attention to psychology in the modern novel afforded expanded thematic access to aberrant states of consciousness. In a way, this returned the novel to its prototype in Don Quixote, and rejuvenated awareness of depicted mania in realist novels. Eight novels are profiled here (by Fowles, Fitzgerald, Lowry, Dostoyevsky, Canetti, Mann, Conrad, and Woolf) in order to examine narrative strategies for exploring madness, and implicating the reader’s consciousness as a participatory component of mental aberration. This approach counters Georg Lukács’s contention that depictions of mental aberration violated the novel’s obligation to depict normality. Modernism, he claimed, privileged distortion, but the novelists examined here suggest that the historical pressures of modernity provided distortions exceeding any particular imaginative license. These pressures are acutely rendered in portraits of domesticity in The Secret Agent by Conrad and Mrs Dalloway by Woolf, two among many such reckonings with geo-political trauma casting a shadow over private life.
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