Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form

193 Pages·2015·3.59 MB·English

by  Pieter Vermeulen

Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel
Also by Pieter Vermeulen
GEOFFREY HARTMAN: Romanticism after the Holocaust
CULTURAL IDENTITY AND POSTMODERN WRITING
(co-edited with Theo D’haen)
RE-THINKING EUROPE: Literature and (Trans)National Identity
(co-edited with Nele Bemong and Mirjam Truwant)
INSTITUTIONS OF WORLD LITERATURE: Writing, Translation, Markets
(co-edited with Stefan Helgesson)
Contemporary Literature and
the End of the Novel
Creature, Affect, Form
Pieter Vermeulen
© Pieter Vermeulen 2015
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First published 2015 by
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For
Mats and Stine,
affective agents
no novel
can contain
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: After-Affects 1
Genre dying into form 1
Fictions of agency 4
Emotion, literature, affect 7
Scope and scale 12
The novel, in theory 17
1 Persistent Affect (Tom McCarthy, David Shields, Lars Iyer) 19
Burying the novel 19
Tom McCarthy and the traumatization of fiction 23
Affect and superimposition in Remainder 29
Improper burials: affects of the real in David Shields’
Reality Hunger 38
Lars Iyer: toward farcical life 43
2 Abandoned Creatures ( J.M. Coetzee) 47
Fact, affect, fiction 47
After Disgrace: desire and the end of the novel 50
Creatural abandon 54
The rise of the novel and the domestication of creatural life 59
The author as creature: Slow Man 63
Exposure time: Diary of a Bad Year 73
3 Cosmopolitan Dissociation (Teju Cole) 81
Flights of memory 82
Cosmopolitanism, human rights, and the novel:
Kant to the present 85
Fugue form and the monotony of noise 91
The aesthetics of the “still legible” 95
The fl âneur and the shadow of the fugueur 100
4 Epic Failures (Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru, Russell Banks) 105
Lukács’s contemporaneity 105
The revolution will not be novelized: Hari Kunzru’s
My Revolutions 110
vii
viii Contents
Analog agency: Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document 116
Russell Banks’s The Darling and the worlding of the
post-9/11 novel 126
Coda: The Descent of the Novel ( James Meek) 134
The scales of literature 137
On creatural war 140
Worldliness and creatural shame 142
Not sinking but descending: the affect of the present 146
Notes 153
Works Cited 167
Index 178
Acknowledgments
I am finishing this book as I am about to return to the Department of
Literary Studies at the University of Leuven, the place where it was first
conceived four years ago. I spent these four years first as a postdoctoral
researcher at Ghent University’s Centre for Literature and Trauma
(LITRA), and then as an assistant professor in Stockholm University’s
English Department. I owe it to the inspiration, provocation, and gen-
erosity of the intellectual communities in these different places that
writing this book has been a more exciting and fulfilling experience
than I had imagined. In Stockholm, I had the good luck to encounter
a head of department committed to providing a welcoming and sup-
portive environment for young scholars; apart from Claudia Egerer,
I especially want to thank Stefan Helgesson for his intellectual and pro-
fessional generosity, and Bo Ekelund, Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson,
Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva, Paul Schreiber, and the other members of
the literature section for continuous support, friendship, and dialogue.
In Ghent, I wish to acknowledge the support and kindness of Stef Craps
and Gert Buelens. In Leuven, Ortwin de Graef and Arne De Winde
played a quietly enabling role in thinking through the stakes and chal-
lenges of this project when I started to conceive it.
Several parts of this book began or developed as presentations, lec-
tures, or workshops. These parts, and indeed the book as a whole, owe a
lot to discussions in Copenhagen, Durham, Linköping, Leuven, London,
Odense, Stockholm, Uppsala, Urbana-Champaign, and Zaragoza. I have
to thank Lucy Bond, Rick Crownshaw, Kristina Fjelkestam, Danuta
Fjellestad, Kasper Green Krejberg, Jessica Rapson, Michael Rothberg,
Peter Simonsen, David Watson, and Helena Wulff for the opportunities
to share some of the work that went into this book.
In the last few years, much of my thinking on the ethics and politics
of the novel form intersected with that of Arne De Boever, and I am
grateful that these intersections invariably served as encouragements.
Reading through the manuscript one last time, I was reminded how
many of my ideas were triggered by wonderfully suggestive posts on
Michael Sayeau’s blog, Ads Without Products, which not only reads the
right books, but also asks the right questions.
Most things I think I know about the relations between affects,
creatures, and forms, and about the exhilarating messiness of living,
ix