The Novel and Media: Three Essays

These three short papers were initially formulated as contributions to a roundtable discussion on The Novel and Media held at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center in May 2018. Their brief was to contribute to the recent project of methodological reflection set in train by a resurgence of formalist analysis in literary criticism by thinking about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies; at the most general level our challenge was to reflect upon the relation between the medium and the form of the literary text, and beyond that about the relation between the print medium in which the novel originated and the other media which form its environment and on which it frequently reflects. We start, then, with a reading of one of the most influential recent attempts to rethink formalist analysis, Caroline Levine’s Forms; John Frow contrasts her project with Jonathan Grossman’s Kittlerian reading of The Pickwick Papers in terms of the relation between two media of communication (coaching and the postal service) and the two novelistic forms that ‘correspond’ to them, in order to open up some questions about the limits and the appropriate focus of an analysis of novelistic forms. Melissa Hardie then moves to a consideration of the novelistic medium at its most material, taking the ‘queer materiality’ of Alvin Lustig’s 1948 jacket design for Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood as an index both of the ‘pulp’ presentation by which modernist texts acquired a wider readership and of the ‘queer ekphrasis’ of the novel itself. And Kelly Rich reads Zadie Smith’s NW as offering a robust account of the encounter between the novel as a narrative genre and various forms of digital media. In Alan Liu’s words, the novel is engaged in and works to illuminate the ‘thick, unpredictable zone of contact...where (mis)understandings of new media are negotiated along twisting, partial, and contradictory vectors’.