Reading from Terry Eagleton, “What is a Novel?” from The English Novel (2005) Discussion questions: How may we define the novel as a literary genre? How.

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Presentation transcript:

Reading from Terry Eagleton, “What is a Novel?” from The English Novel (2005) Discussion questions: How may we define the novel as a literary genre? How does it relate to other literary genres? How is it distinct from them? What are the social factors behind the emergence of the novel?

How may we define the novel as a literary genre? Short answer: “Prose fiction of reasonable length” (p. 1). 1. Fiction: “’a story (true or false) treated in such a way as to make it clear that it has a significance beyond itself” (p. 13) 2. Novelistic fiction is a balancing act: “Exemplariness without realism is empty, whereas realism without exemplariness is blind” (p. 14) 3. A discourse on the present rather than the past (p. 6) 4. Meta-literary awareness and self-reflexive perspective (p. 3) 5. A popular genre and an vernacular literary art (p. 8) 6. Not all novels are realist, but realism is the dominant style of the modern English novel (p. 11) 7. An ironic form: necessity of a form (plot) requires deviation from realism. Thus, to provide form, novelists make you aware that you are “in” the reality of the novel, and that “realism” of novel not to be mistaken for actual existence (p. 15) 8. ‘The epic of a world abandoned by God” (p. 16)

How does it relate to other literary genres? Novel “cannibalizes” all other literary modes – poetry, etc., can be found within a novel (not the other way around) (p.1 & p. 6) “The epic of the prosaic modern world” (p. 6) Anti-ceremonial; never written to mark special event or as an “occasional” form (ode, elegy) (p. 11) Replaces poetry as a public genre in the 19 th century; poetry becomes synonymous with the interior, the personal, and the spiritual or psychological (p. 12)

How is it distinct form other literary forms? Myths are cyclical, the novel is unpredictable (p. 2) Focus on culture, not Nature or the supernatural; wary of the abstract and eternal, rests on the empirical (p. 3) Roots in the romance, but a romance set in a prosaic reality (not chivalric court setting) (p. 2, 6) Moral realism; neither revolutionary nor reactionary, yet reformist, committed to change (p. 7) Bears the fingerprint of an individual writer (“style”) unlike impersonal narrator of epic (p. 7) A democratic literary art, hostile to static, hierarchical, de- historicized, socially exclusive art of classical humanity (p. 8)

What are social factors of emergence of novel? Associated with emergence of a middle class in England in the 18 th century, “dream of total freedom from restraint” (p. 2) Born at same time as modern science: secular, sober, investigative (p. 7) Where can be traced it back to? Don Quixote? Robinson Crusoe? (p. 2) Romantic idealism -> egoism, author or hero can’t get outside his own head; the opposite, realism, is engaged with society (pp. 4-5) The novel affirms the common life, yet the values it engages “are at their most diverse and conflicting” – the condition of modernity (p. 5) According to Soviet literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, the novel emerges when any centralized authority or ideology begins to break apart (p. 6).