Free indirect : the novel in a postfictional age / Timothy Bewes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bewes, Timothy, author.

Series:

Literature now

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fiction--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Fiction genres--Philosophy.

Fiction genres.

Postmodernism (Literature).

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xv, 315 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New York : Columbia University Press, [2022]

Summary:

"Everywhere today, we are urged to "connect." Literary critics celebrate a new "honesty" in contemporary fiction or call for a return to "realism." Yet such rhetoric is strikingly reminiscent of earlier theorizations. Two of the most famous injunctions of twentieth-century writing-E. M. Forster's "Only connect . . ." and Fredric Jameson's "Always historicize!"-helped establish connection as the purpose of the novel and its reconstruction as the task of criticism. But what if connection was not the novel's modus operandi but the defining aesthetic ideology of our era-and its most monetizable commodity? What kind of thought is left for the novel when all ideas are acceptable as long as they can be fitted to a consumer profile? This book develops a new theory of the novel for the twenty-first century. In the works of writers such as J. M. Coetzee, Rachel Cusk, James Kelman, W. G. Sebald, and Zadie Smith, Timothy Bewes identifies a mode of thought that he calls "free indirect," in which the novel's refusal of prevailing ideologies can be found. It is not situated in a character or a narrator and does not take a subjective or perceptual form. Far from heralding the arrival of a new literary mode, this development represents the rediscovery of a quality that has been largely ignored by theorists: thought at the limits of form. Free Indirect contends that this self-awakening of contemporary fiction represents the most promising solution to the problem of thought today"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: pt. I The Novel Form and Its Limits

ch. One The Problem of Form

The Novel Thinks

The Meaning of Novelistic Form

Absolute Relationality

Free Indirect Discourse and the Free Indirect

ch. Two Against Exemplarity: W. G. Sebald

Instance and Example

Exemplarity and the Novel

Principles of Narration

The Pure Look

The Struggle o/Austerlitz

pt. II The Emergence of Postfictional Aesthetics

ch. Three The Instantiation Relation

The Contemporary Critical Predicament

The Bridge (the Problem of the Opening)

The Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism So The Instantiation Relation in Literary Criticism

All Views Are Partial: Reading Zadie Smith

ch. Four The Postfictional Hypothesis

Degree-Zero Connection

From Representation to Instantiation: Forster's Howards End

Collapse of Narrative Standpoint

Instantiation as a Question of Language: Possible Objections

ch. Five The Logic of Disconnection

Chronotopes of Interpretation: Foucault with Bakhtin

The "Novelistic Element": Free Indirect Discourse

A Theory of "Discontinuous Systematicities"?

Is Disconnection Also a Chronotope?

Interlude: Fictional Discourse as Event: On Jesse Ball

pt. III The Free Indirect

ch. Six How Does Immanence Show Itself?

The Sense of Sense

A Theory of the Contemporary Novel?

Resolution as "Deflection": Lukdcs with Cora Diamond

Instantiation and the Literary Regime

ch. Seven What Is a Sensorimotor Break? Deleuze on Cinema

The Possibility of Thinking

The Historical Argument

The Any-Instant-Whatever, the Out-of-Field, the Interstice

Heautonomy

Disconnecting the Sides: Free Indirect Subjective

Interlude Profiling

ch. Eight Ranciere: Toward Nonregime Thinking

The Aesthetic Regime

Hitchcock: Cinema of Completion

The Interstice: Realist Form or Crystals of Time?

Penultimacy

The Primacy of Relation: Samuel Beckett.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Bewes, Timothy. Free indirect

ISBN:

9780231191609

023119160X

9780231192972

0231192975

OCLC:

1286071444