Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10251389
Kalyan Nadiminti
{"title":"Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies","authors":"Kalyan Nadiminti","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10251389","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251389","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47759712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10251352
A. Hoberek
{"title":"Possible Futures","authors":"A. Hoberek","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10251352","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251352","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45205388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10251370
Sarah L. Wasserman
{"title":"The End of the World as We Know It","authors":"Sarah L. Wasserman","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10251370","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251370","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42654890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10251262
Nathan Wainstein
Formalist novel criticism has a strange relationship to artistic failure. Although an array of twentieth-century theoretical frameworks have taught critics to find value and meaning in negative formal phenomena that may resemble writerly lapses (such as moments of contradiction, discontinuity, or ambiguity), the same critics rarely make actual negative judgments about literary form. This article examines and challenges this critical trend. It begins by introducing the new formal category of the narrative glitch: a microscopic disruption of fictional mimesis that resembles both a formal experiment and a simple writerly failure. It then turns to the work of William Faulkner, whose novels Sanctuary and Absalom, Absalom! reveal a buried alliance between criticism's customary ways of understanding glitches and an older modernist aesthetics. In Absalom, Absalom!, General Compson's celebratory close reading of a temporal rupture in Thomas Sutpen's narrative models an essentially modernist trope of glitch interpretation (the aesthetic redemption of a formal rupture as temporally mimetic) that remains popular in criticism to this day. At the same time, Faulkner's own glitches in Sanctuary, when read as genuine writerly lapses, dramatize the fallibility of this enduring critical gesture and thus subvert and estrange criticism's latent modernism.
{"title":"Faulkner's Glitches","authors":"Nathan Wainstein","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10251262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251262","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Formalist novel criticism has a strange relationship to artistic failure. Although an array of twentieth-century theoretical frameworks have taught critics to find value and meaning in negative formal phenomena that may resemble writerly lapses (such as moments of contradiction, discontinuity, or ambiguity), the same critics rarely make actual negative judgments about literary form. This article examines and challenges this critical trend. It begins by introducing the new formal category of the narrative glitch: a microscopic disruption of fictional mimesis that resembles both a formal experiment and a simple writerly failure. It then turns to the work of William Faulkner, whose novels Sanctuary and Absalom, Absalom! reveal a buried alliance between criticism's customary ways of understanding glitches and an older modernist aesthetics. In Absalom, Absalom!, General Compson's celebratory close reading of a temporal rupture in Thomas Sutpen's narrative models an essentially modernist trope of glitch interpretation (the aesthetic redemption of a formal rupture as temporally mimetic) that remains popular in criticism to this day. At the same time, Faulkner's own glitches in Sanctuary, when read as genuine writerly lapses, dramatize the fallibility of this enduring critical gesture and thus subvert and estrange criticism's latent modernism.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48135423","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10251244
N. Boer
This article diagnoses and discusses the emergence of a set of contemporary realist novels that engage with historical events, connect disparate parts of the global South through depicting travel or displacement, and feature subaltern protagonists. Exemplified by Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, these novels stage a reengagement with the archives of imperialism and oppression to discuss global rather than national histories, from the viewpoint of the marginalized. Frameworks such as the postcolonial historical novel or postmodern historiographical metafiction obscure the novelty of these texts, which signal a shift from the national to the transnational, from postmodernism to dense realism, and from the “middling” protagonist to marginal, subaltern protagonists. Working through close readings of two representative novels, Peter Kimani's Dance of the Jakaranda (2017) and Esi Edugyan's Washington Black (2018), the article proposes that the framework of the global South novel is more relevant, as these novels respond to the same stimuli—disillusionment with the nation-state and globalization, and a concrete investment in subaltern solidarity as a counternarrative to these earlier reactions to the end of colonialism and the Cold War—that global South theorists are addressing. It concludes by arguing for the value of defining the genre of the global South novel intrinsically, from the content and form of the work, rather than extrinsically, on the basis of the author's origin, the place of publication, or the setting of the work.
{"title":"Contemporary Transnational Historical Fiction: Forging Solidarities in the Global South Novel","authors":"N. Boer","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10251244","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251244","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article diagnoses and discusses the emergence of a set of contemporary realist novels that engage with historical events, connect disparate parts of the global South through depicting travel or displacement, and feature subaltern protagonists. Exemplified by Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy, these novels stage a reengagement with the archives of imperialism and oppression to discuss global rather than national histories, from the viewpoint of the marginalized. Frameworks such as the postcolonial historical novel or postmodern historiographical metafiction obscure the novelty of these texts, which signal a shift from the national to the transnational, from postmodernism to dense realism, and from the “middling” protagonist to marginal, subaltern protagonists. Working through close readings of two representative novels, Peter Kimani's Dance of the Jakaranda (2017) and Esi Edugyan's Washington Black (2018), the article proposes that the framework of the global South novel is more relevant, as these novels respond to the same stimuli—disillusionment with the nation-state and globalization, and a concrete investment in subaltern solidarity as a counternarrative to these earlier reactions to the end of colonialism and the Cold War—that global South theorists are addressing. It concludes by arguing for the value of defining the genre of the global South novel intrinsically, from the content and form of the work, rather than extrinsically, on the basis of the author's origin, the place of publication, or the setting of the work.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48540345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-10251407
D. Daniels
{"title":"Always Be Prepared","authors":"D. Daniels","doi":"10.1215/00295132-10251407","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-10251407","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49061280","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624534
J. Levin
Readers traditionally associate heroism with risk and confidence in one's abilities. Yet within the realist tradition, Henry James creates a portrait of an unconfident heroine. The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver demonstrates she has the ability to become an effective actor, and she can be read as a special case within the underdog character type. Despite being caught in a deception plot, she surprises readers with the pleasure of a “win” by developing a specific know-how that relies on reading temporal tensions. The article uses theoretical work on temporality by Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou to explore how Maggie's confidence and courage emerge from the depths of anxiety and how this process allows James to create a narrative in which the reader learns to gauge and appreciate human action in process.
{"title":"Temporality and the Unconfident Heroine in Henry James's The Golden Bowl","authors":"J. Levin","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8624534","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624534","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Readers traditionally associate heroism with risk and confidence in one's abilities. Yet within the realist tradition, Henry James creates a portrait of an unconfident heroine. The Golden Bowl's Maggie Verver demonstrates she has the ability to become an effective actor, and she can be read as a special case within the underdog character type. Despite being caught in a deception plot, she surprises readers with the pleasure of a “win” by developing a specific know-how that relies on reading temporal tensions. The article uses theoretical work on temporality by Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou to explore how Maggie's confidence and courage emerge from the depths of anxiety and how this process allows James to create a narrative in which the reader learns to gauge and appreciate human action in process.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"341-359"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41601045","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624606
B. Davies
The first two books of J. M. Coetzee's recent trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), are extremely strange. Just when “the Australian fiction,” following the works set in South Africa and various international locations, was thought to be the last phase of Coetzee's career, the Nobel laureate changed tack. The Jesus books challenge readers and critics with their sparse tone, lengthy philosophical dialogues, and allegorical obscurity. Their difficulty seems to shed little light on some of the most intriguing questions about Coetzee's writing: namely, its form and its interaction with allegory. Beginning with a reappraisal of a classic work of Coetzee studies, this essay then lays out a theory about the connection between reading and writing allegory within traditions of what constitutes a “novel.” In the second section, examples from Coetzee's earlier fiction are analyzed, with focus on In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Boyhood (1997). Parental roles are found to be vital in the connections between the novel form and allegory. The third section applies these analyses to Childhood and Schooldays. Focus on the books’ references to Plato and Don Quixote helps scrutinize their philosophy and reach the thesis of this essay: that with these books, Coetzee experiments with a form that goes beyond the novel.
{"title":"Growing Up Against Allegory: The Late Works of J. M. Coetzee","authors":"B. Davies","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8624606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624606","url":null,"abstract":"The first two books of J. M. Coetzee's recent trilogy, The Childhood of Jesus (2013) and The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), are extremely strange. Just when “the Australian fiction,” following the works set in South Africa and various international locations, was thought to be the last phase of Coetzee's career, the Nobel laureate changed tack. The Jesus books challenge readers and critics with their sparse tone, lengthy philosophical dialogues, and allegorical obscurity. Their difficulty seems to shed little light on some of the most intriguing questions about Coetzee's writing: namely, its form and its interaction with allegory. Beginning with a reappraisal of a classic work of Coetzee studies, this essay then lays out a theory about the connection between reading and writing allegory within traditions of what constitutes a “novel.” In the second section, examples from Coetzee's earlier fiction are analyzed, with focus on In the Heart of the Country (1977) and Boyhood (1997). Parental roles are found to be vital in the connections between the novel form and allegory. The third section applies these analyses to Childhood and Schooldays. Focus on the books’ references to Plato and Don Quixote helps scrutinize their philosophy and reach the thesis of this essay: that with these books, Coetzee experiments with a form that goes beyond the novel.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"419-435"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42005898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624516
Abby Scribner
This article takes up two famously disliked nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë's Villette—and argues that they are dissatisfying to readers because their protagonists fail to cohere as liberal subjects around a legible interior realm. Mansfield Park initially offers its east room as a spatial analogue for Fanny Price's interior, but it gradually revokes narrative access to the space in order to defer wholly to external status markers. Likewise, Villette's Lucy Snowe creates architectural constructions as a means of representing her inner realm to an outside world. However, each instance results in an impossible space that fails to establish the contours of Lucy's interior. The article reads the failures of subjectivation in the two novels in light of critical accounts that link the nineteenth-century novel to liberalism, a link that is often established through a shared emphasis on the interior. It thus examines what could come next once such a link is broken: a reevaluation of the default political perspective of the nineteenth-century novel but also a renewed understanding of the variety of subjective forms that liberalism is able to capture.
{"title":"Liberalism and Inner Life: The Curious Cases of Mansfield Park and Villette","authors":"Abby Scribner","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8624516","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624516","url":null,"abstract":"This article takes up two famously disliked nineteenth-century novels—Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Charlotte Brontë's Villette—and argues that they are dissatisfying to readers because their protagonists fail to cohere as liberal subjects around a legible interior realm. Mansfield Park initially offers its east room as a spatial analogue for Fanny Price's interior, but it gradually revokes narrative access to the space in order to defer wholly to external status markers. Likewise, Villette's Lucy Snowe creates architectural constructions as a means of representing her inner realm to an outside world. However, each instance results in an impossible space that fails to establish the contours of Lucy's interior. The article reads the failures of subjectivation in the two novels in light of critical accounts that link the nineteenth-century novel to liberalism, a link that is often established through a shared emphasis on the interior. It thus examines what could come next once such a link is broken: a reevaluation of the default political perspective of the nineteenth-century novel but also a renewed understanding of the variety of subjective forms that liberalism is able to capture.","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"317-340"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47562369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-01DOI: 10.1215/00295132-8624588
B. Robinson
J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man considers “care” in contemporary liberal-capitalist societies, including the ostensibly frivolous care of and care for literature. In contrast to grander affects and occupations, care often seems to be “just care,” as if it fails to live up to certain criteria of reality in much the same way that one says something is “just fiction.” If in its literary investigation of such serious issues as disability, aging, and immigration, Slow Man turns into a reflection on the ontology of fiction, this is not mere metafictional frivolity—for care shares the disparaged form of fiction. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello writings, of which Slow Man appears to be the last, advocate in fiction an “ethics of care.” They are concerned with modes of attention that lack the categorical determinacy of the discourse of rights and of justice and are instead characterized by what I propose to call “justness.” In this light, the novel can be read as examining the skepticism and disappointment with which, on account of this justness, earnest pleas for an ethics of care, or apologies for fiction, are met. The advocacy of care, as of fiction, requires not only good will but also good humor, even if this comes at the cost of being taken seriously. Accordingly, Slow Man proves to be one of the most heavy-going but also lighthearted of Coetzee's novels. It is, after all, “just a joke.”
{"title":"Fiction Cares: J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man","authors":"B. Robinson","doi":"10.1215/00295132-8624588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00295132-8624588","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man considers “care” in contemporary liberal-capitalist societies, including the ostensibly frivolous care of and care for literature. In contrast to grander affects and occupations, care often seems to be “just care,” as if it fails to live up to certain criteria of reality in much the same way that one says something is “just fiction.” If in its literary investigation of such serious issues as disability, aging, and immigration, Slow Man turns into a reflection on the ontology of fiction, this is not mere metafictional frivolity—for care shares the disparaged form of fiction. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello writings, of which Slow Man appears to be the last, advocate in fiction an “ethics of care.” They are concerned with modes of attention that lack the categorical determinacy of the discourse of rights and of justice and are instead characterized by what I propose to call “justness.” In this light, the novel can be read as examining the skepticism and disappointment with which, on account of this justness, earnest pleas for an ethics of care, or apologies for fiction, are met. The advocacy of care, as of fiction, requires not only good will but also good humor, even if this comes at the cost of being taken seriously. Accordingly, Slow Man proves to be one of the most heavy-going but also lighthearted of Coetzee's novels. It is, after all, “just a joke.”","PeriodicalId":44981,"journal":{"name":"NOVEL-A FORUM ON FICTION","volume":"53 1","pages":"399-418"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42536216","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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