0. Preamble: Notes on the novel’s death drive

In 1902, Georges Méliès released the now seminal trick film A Trip to the Moon. The film, which was inspired by two of Jule Verne’s earlier novels, follows a group of astronomers who travel to the moon and encounter its subterranean inhabitants. Méliès’s film marked the first time a film was able to use technical innovation to create a fantastical spectacle of pure entertainment, that up until that point had been the novel’s domain. 

Later that same year, Verne, “the man who invented the future,” acknowledged that the innovations of film posed a threat to the novel; more imminently, he expressed a belief that the novel was already moribund because of the newfound ability to publish newspapers en masse. With inexpensive, detailed accounts of life locally and globally, what purpose would people have for reading novels anymore?

In 1925, almost a century ago to date, José Ortega y Gasset reiterated Verne’s initial concern in The dehumanization of art and Ideas about the novel which sought, in part, to argue for nonrepresentational forms of art. His perspective on the novel was not hopeful; although he conveyed a certain optimism that the growing mediocrity of novelists would, by way of disparity, make the line of sight to “works of the highest rank” clearer, he also admitted to the “great hour of decline of the genre.” 

Since then, with the minimum recurrence of once per decade, one prominent critic or another has come forward to announce, in increasingly precise and assertive terms, that the novel is now finally on its last legs. 

In 1946, it was Lionel Trilling; in ’55, it was Norman Mailer; in ’57, it was Gasset again, this time to say that the novel was finally, actually, superlatively dying, thirty-two years after his first claim. Marcuse followed suit the next year; in ’66, Louis D. Rubin said the novel had always been dead. Three years later, Ronald Sukenick penned the polemical (and highly entertaining) story The Death of the Novel; in 1977, Raymond Federman said that not only was the novel dead, but so was reading. In 1980, Leslie Fielder agreed; in 1992 Robert Coover said that all books were dying. In 1996, having somehow resurrected itself, Joseph Rabbi declared that the novel was dying again. In the twenty-first century, with the acceleration of digital distribution and the polyphony online, this repetition became inane. The list went on. On and out. In 2014, a Twitter account was created to cite critics, novelists, and novels themselves that they believed chronicled the death of the form. In 2020, the account was deleted.

In 1965, Frank Kermode wrote a largely forgotten essay in the New York Review of Books about the fickle finality of the novel’s demise. “The special fate of the novel, considered as a genre,” he writes, “is to be always dying.” What he diagnosed was the novel’s cycle of birth and rebirth as a Theseusian recurrence; for the novel to be a living form, it must always be, like all living things, dying. 

In the novel’s healthy, recurrent life cycle, the conventional novel is countered by the anti-novel, and the death of the old is declared, whether in celebration or sorrow, in response to the new. Then the anti-novel becomes conventional, and a new anti-novel is born. So has been the cycle of romanticism to psychologism, psychologism to modernism, modernism to postmodernism, and so on, in the persistent reinvention of the novelistic form through time. 

Now, in a period obsessed with time-efficiency, return on investment, and an unceasing bend toward money-making, it is common for people to wonder what “value” novels have anymore, particularly with literary fiction leaning more toward niche interest than cultural force. 

Commonly offered answers are typically a slight variation of the same theme: namely, that novels allow their readers to empathize with new perspectives, or more tritely, “new stories” (to say nothing of structuralism), and develop a more complete and complicated view of the world. But what if a novel doesn’t do that? What defines a novel to begin with?  

To debate the state of the novel, its historical dialectic, and its potential future pathways, it is important to first establish an understanding of the history of the novel and its theories, both constitutionally, in the sense of the attributes that have defined the novel’s varied forms, and functionally, in terms of the roles it has adopted for both the reader and writer. 

The following syllabus is meant to organize some of these various theories and histories. In addition to the critical readings of each curricular section, there are recommended novels and stories that reflect the critical position of one or more of the pieces of the section to which they belong.

A brief note: The texts herein live largely under the umbrella of a “Western Canon.” Despite the contemporary works of Eastern academics like Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and owing to the rapid evolution of the novel as a form in the post-colonial world, it is difficult to identify pre-colonial theories of the novel (although there are many concerning poetry, stretching back as far as the 11th century in Lady Murasaki, debatably the first novelist).

1. Defining the novel: What is it that we are reading?

An art form is broadly defined as “a conventionally established form of artistic composition, such as the novel, sonata, or sonnet.” But whereas a sonata is easily defined as music played, or a sonnet, which is defined by its structural parameters, the novel’s definition has remained elusive, in part because of the continued innovation required to keep it new.

Most conventional definitions of what constitutes a novel are either recursive (i.e., “the literary genre exemplified by novels,” as stated in the Oxford English Dictionary) or unsatisfactorily limited. 

For instance, an alternately prescriptive definition of the novel in the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism,” to say nothing of surreal or fantastical genre and literary writing, non-fiction novels, and the threshold for a “book length” work itself. 

The following texts provide some structure in delimiting novels from other forms of writing. Goldmann offers a definition of what he views to be the three underlying structures of a novel: abstract realism, the psychological novel, and the bildungsroman. None of these categories speak to genre affectations or limitations of realism versus nonrealism, fiction versus nonfiction; instead, they set parameters for the novel’s components (e.g., narration, character, plot, style) that themselves can only be organized into so many global structures. 

Doody, Steiner, and Eagleton complement Goldmann’s work by providing histories of the novel of varying lengths—honing in, by process of elimination, on what a novel is not, although the only consensus that can be arrived at is that the novel is not something that can be totally defined. Quoting Virginia Woolf, Eagleton calls the novel ‘the most pliable of all forms.’ By virtue of its mercurial nature, the novel is a form that defies rigid categorization; its only definition as a form is that it is required to continually reinvent itself in order to survive. 

Texts:

• Towards a Sociology of the Novel (1963), Lucien Goldmann
• The True Story of the Novel (1996), Margaret Doody
• Grammars of Creation (2001), George Steiner 
• The English Novel: An Introduction (2004), Terry Eagleton

Novels: 

• First Love (1860), Ivan Turgenev
• Pale Fire (1962), Vladimir Nabokov
• Passages (1969), Ann Quin
• Love Me Tender (2021), Constance Debré

2. Narrative invention and narration: Who are we reading, who can we become

Because of its use in organizing our daily lives, the ingoing expectation of narration is for it to be fixed and coherent, with the purpose of smoothening the melee of life’s absurd proceedings. Whether this be the perspective of a single narrator, who is both present and influential on the order of events (i.e., intradiegetic-homodiegetic), or external to the sequence of events, usually omniscient, and if not, detained by consistent logic of observation (i.e., extradiegetic-heterodiegetic). 

And yet, the problem of narration and the way in which it can be used in novels to cultivate challenge, conversation, and competition in the reader-writer relationship goes far beyond what is typically appreciated in casual reading. There are approaches, like the extradiegetic-homodiegetic narration in portions of Dennis Cooper’s Frisk, that opt to openly provoke confusion about the narrator’s point of view and narrative authority, reflecting a prevailing mood of the time.  

The main ethos of the texts listed herein is to investigate different historical modes of narration to inspire new approaches to the practice, and challenge how these methods can be used not only to tell stories to each other, but how they can be related to our own internal narration as we search for meaning in a sea of memories, flailing to find a linear cause for every effect.  

Texts:

• Narrate or Describe? (1936), Georg Lukács 
• Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1962), Jorge Luis Borges
• The fantastic; a structural approach to a literary genre (1975), Tzvetan Todorov
• Reading for the Plot (1992), Peter S. Brooks
• Meander, Spiral, Explode (2019), Jane Allison 
• Seduced by Story (2022), Peter S. Brooks
• The Crisis of Narration (2024), Byung-Chul Han 

Novels: 

• Angel in the Forest (1945), Marguerite Young
• JR (1975), William Gaddis
• Frisk (1991), Dennis Cooper
• Cloudland (2019), Amy Hempel

3. Novel-reading as action: Toward transcendence 

A common argument for why the novel is dying is that people have largely deferred to more passive forms of entertainment. In David Foster Wallace’s essay, he outlines how television satisfies the same voyeuristic urge of novels with a higher degree of sensorial fidelity and less cognitive demand. 

Likewise, Roland Barthes divides novels into two groups. On one side, there are the readerly texts, oftentimes genre books by writers like Stephen King, that maintain a passive engagement and evoke, in the reader, jouissance; the French word associated with orgasm. On the other side, there are writerly texts, which require action on behalf of the reader—whether to meaningfully interpret the texts, and/or meaningfully engage with their position as a subject and participant in the text—that pushes readers to break out of their comfortable leisurely position. 

It’s trite to say that invigoration and excitement cannot come from inaction, but it’s true that in their purest, most inspired form, novels can be revolutionary objects, ones whose words are able to transcend the meaning prescribed to them, and if not rearrange the world in relation to our consciousness, then at least rearrange our consciousness in relation to the world. 

Texts:

• ABC of Reading (1934), Ezra Pound
• The Space of Literature (1955), Maurice Blanchot 
• S/Z (1970) and The Pleasure of Text (1973), Roland Barthes
• The Act of Reading (1978), Wolfgang Iser
• E Unibus Pluram (1993), David Foster Wallace

Novels:

• The Wings of the Dove (1902), Henry James
• Pitch Dark (1973), Renata Adler
• All the Names (1997), Jose Saramago 
• Life Is Everywhere (2022), Lucy Ives

4. Mimesis and replication: Fitting and reordering the world in a page

One of the initial ambitions of novelization—which was challenged from its infancy by theater and painting, and has since been deposed by photography and film—was to use the building blocks of language to conform the expanse of lived experience to the confines of the written word. 

The limitations of lingual mimesis have long been acknowledged, and are quite intuitive, but the ways in which these limitations can be used to recontextualize and estrange the world around us by borrowing recognizable components of reality’s composition are often taken for granted, or unknown. 

As importantly outlined by Shklovsky, Tomasi, and Auerbach, there is a distinction between our seeing the essence of those things described in a text, and our superficial recognition of textual events, as guided by the formulae, conventions, and preconceptions that ease our (sometimes unconscious) navigation of a complex world. The sense of defamiliarization evoked by seeing, or ostranenie in Shklovsky’s terms, is the fundamental power wielded by all art: to transform details of the world that have become banal and unnoticed into experiences that are equal-parts alien and familiar. The capacity to develop new methods for novelistic estrangement are fundamental not only to keeping the novel alive, but in keeping the world feeling new. 

Texts:

• On the Theory of Prose (1925), Viktor Shklovsky 
• The Literary Theory of Shimamura Hōgetsu and the Construction of Japanese Naturalism (2008), Massimiliano Tomasi
• Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), Erich Auerbach 

Novels:

• The Castle (1926), Franz Kafka
• Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing (1952), René Daumal
• Berg (1964), Ann Quin
• The Hearing Trumpet (1974), Leonora Carrington

5. Contemporary realism and the social novel: Fiction as life, life as fiction

By this point in the syllabus, it should be clear that the possibilities of keeping the novel new are not to be found in the confines of the social novel. Despite the earliest of iterations of the novel as a locus of social recreation, recrimination, and revolution, the social novel is the hegemonic form of the novel most frequently deferred to at moments of developmental challenge (as outlined by Tom Wolfe optimistically, and Zadie Smith more skeptically). 

More specifically, every time a new communicative form gains cultural prominence and threatens the historical role inherited by the novel—whether it be television series, new journalism, prime-time news broadcasts, or social media—someone argues (as Wolfe does explicitly, and Franzen implicitly) that the remaining hope for the novel is to compete with other media to be crowned the artistic champion of social issues. However, this argument itself concedes the perimeter of the novel’s potential, and encourages a pyrrhic battle for cultural grounds already lost to new communicative technologies.

The novels in this section are as important, if not more important than the accompanying critical texts, providing a (substantially reduced) lineage of the social novel’s evolution, and the reduced capacity for the contemporary social novel to replicate and investigate the totality of our hypermediated world.

Texts:

• The Theory of The Novel (1916), Lukacs “Totality of life”
• Manners, Morals and the Novel (1948), Lionel Trilling
• Stalking the Billion Footed Beast (1989), Tom Wolfe
• American Writing Today: A Diagnosis of the Disease (1990), William T. Vollman
• Perchance to Dream (1996), Jonathan Franzen
• Two Paths for the Novel (2008), Zadie Smith

Novels:

• Clarissa (1748), Samuel Richardson
• Nana (1880), Émile Zola
• The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Saul Bellow
• Netherland (2008), Joseph O’Neill

6. The new novel: Objects as information

In the 1960’s, when Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote his seminal text On a New Novel, he decried the labeling of his earlier novels as unreadable anti-novels, by emphasizing—as I have repeatedly by now—the importance of innovating the novel for it to remain worthy of its name. Quoting Heidegger, as Blanchot often did, Robbe-Grillet guided his practice by the notion that the only given purpose of the human condition is to “be there.” 

Robbe-Grillet sought to remove the neurotic interiority and misleading narrational intervention that had situated the modernist’s psyche as the cause and effect of all universal happenings, and that cast the paranoid anxieties of the emergent postmodernists onto their pages. 

The objective of the new novel, furthered by Robbe-Grillet’s contemporaries like Nathalie Sarraute, and those he influenced like Tom McCarthy, was to ground the novel in the observable material world; otherwise, he feared that the anthropomorphized objects and sensationalized inner lives of figurative writing would isolate the author and reader by blanketing the world in a descriptive estrangement borne by delusion.

In many ways, the project of the new novel, which seeks to excise subjective description (i.e., minimize the use of adjectives, metaphor, or poetic flourish), is to prevent the definitions of words from being appropriated for poetic means within the novel, and to create novelistic worlds defined with an austere rigidity; worlds that are highly interpretable and in many ways impenetrable, just as the world we encounter seems to be. As written by Blanchot in The Book to Come: “Where is literature going? . . . towards itself, its essence, which is disappearance,” or: a readerly experience that matches the fluid mystery of being alive. 

Texts:

• The Book to Come (1959), Maurice Blanchot 
• On A New Novel (1966), Alain-Robbe Grillet
• The Writer and the Absolute (1952), Wyndham Lewis

Novels:

• Jealousy (1957), Alain Robbe-Grillet
• Life: A User’s Manual (1978), Georges Perec
• The Malady of Death (1982), Marguerite Duras
• This Is Not a Novel (2001), David Markson

7. The postmodern problem: Beyond our fickle reality, paranoia, and the crisis of truth

John Barth’s seminal essay The Literature of Exhaustion is often recognized as the birthplace of postmodernism. In it, he writes that realism, in its then-form, had become “used up”; the novel as they knew it was dying, and its new evolution would consist of “novels which imitate the form of a novel, by an author who imitates the role of the Author.” 

Commonly, this imitation takes the form of metafiction or some paratextual commentary, whether it be the long winded footnotes of David Foster Wallace, or the contracting distance between narrator and author in the experimental works of the British avant garde led by B.S. Johnson in the 1960’s, or the American Fiction Collective Two (alternately FC2) founded in the 1970’s. 

The objective outlined by these writers was fundamentally revolutionary. Their objective was not to produce simulacra of reality, manipulated and conformed to the deceptive appearance of Truth, but to create a world, in the terms of William Gass, that uses “sentences as containers of consciousness” that reverse the mimetic process to make reality conform to fiction, rather than the other way around. “On the other side of the novel lies the void,” Gass continued, likening the position of a novel to that of a pointing statue, one whose posture leads our gaze to its pointing finger, but not beyond its tip. 

Texts:

• The Literature of Exhaustion (1967), John Barth
• The Death of the Novel (1969), Ronald Sukenick
• The Concept of Character in Fiction (2005), William Gass
• Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as we Know It (2005), Ben Marcus
• What Ever Happened to Modernism? (2010), Gabriel Josipovici
• Reality Hunger (2010), David Shields

Novels:

• Albert Angelo (1964), B.S. Johnson
• Long Talking Bad Conditions Blues (1979), Ronald Sukenick 
• City of Glass (1985), Paul Auster
• Break It Down (1986), Lydia Davis

8. Post-internet writing and alternative literature: Zombie Formalism, or novels after the internet 

After the internet, new possibilities for the novel remain vast and unclear. There is, however, consensus that the internet as content does not necessarily offer new, nor particularly interesting avenues for novelistic exploration. The question instead, as it always has been at the genesis of new movements, lies in how the novel can be used to contain or imitate some of the formal qualities of the internet to literary effect. 

Many formal attributes deemed “internet-like” to date—whether it be the polyphony captured by William Gaddis’ JR, the unceasing conscious stream of found in Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newbury Port, or the fractal newsreel insertions of innovated in both Berlin Alexanderplatz and Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy—were in some instances developed eight decades before the internet’s appearance. Somehow, these approaches have been celebrated as internet-era innovations, instead of being recognized for what they are: undead stylizations, dispassionate in their zombified scroll. 

That is to say, most “internet writing” to date has mimicked, in some way, previously developed forms, who in their own time were mimicking new communicative media (e.g., the radio, the television) whose properties the internet amplifies. 

To embody the internet as a form, authors must mimic what distinguishes the internet from these other forms of media; that is, its capacity for reciprocation. Unlike television, or the radio, which might create the appearance of dialogue, the internet allows users to converse, or at least believe that they are conversing with other users online. 

Therefore, the “democratized” publishing online has made it such that every reader is also an author, and vice-versa. In this syllabus, I have no intention of proposing all the ways in which this reciprocity could materialize; instead, I am encouraging others to consider the ways in which it might be possible to do so, by asserting the locus of formal innovation that will keep the novel alive.

Texts:

• The novel is dead (this time it’s for real) (2014), Will Self
• Polyphony and the Internet Novel (2022), Michael Kaplan
• Reconsidering the Conventions of the So-Called Internet Novel (2022), James Webster
• Internet as Novel (2024), Boris Groys
• Who Needs Fiction After the Internet? (2024), James Duesterberg
• Extremely Online and Incredibly Tedious (2024), Rhian Sasseen
• Who’s Afraid of the Internet Novel? (2024), Erin Somers

Novels:

• Hopscotch (1966), Julio Cortázar
• Book of Numbers (2015), Joshua Cohen
• Liveblog (2015), Megan Boyle
• My First Book (2024), Honor Levy