Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age

337 Pages·2022·4.418 MB·English

by  Timothy Bewes

FREE INDIRECT
LITERATURE NOW
LITERATURE NOW
Matthew Hart, David James, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Series Editors
Literature Now offers a distinct vision of late- twentieth- and early- twenty- first- century literary
culture. Addressing contemporary literature and the ways we understand its meaning, the series
includes books that are comparative and transnational in scope as well as those that focus on
national and regional literary cultures.
Caren Irr, Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty- First Century
Heather Houser, Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect
Mrinalini Chakravorty, In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary
Héctor Hoyos, Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel
Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature
Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision
Sarah Phillips Casteel, Calypso Jews: Jewishness in the Caribbean Literary Imagination
Jeremy Rosen, Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre and the Contemporary
Literary Marketplace
Jesse Matz, Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture
Ashley T. Shelden, Unmaking Love: The Contemporary Novel and the Impossibility of Union
Theodore Martin, Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present
Zara Dinnen, The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture
Gloria Fisk, Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature
Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel
Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, The Ferrante Letters:
An Experiment in Collective Criticism
Christy Wampole, Degenerative Realism: Novel and Nation in Twenty- First- Century France
Heather Houser, Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data
Jessica Pressman, Bookishness: Loving Books in a Digital Age
Sunny Xiang, Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War
Thomas Heise, The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel
Ellen C. Jones, Literature in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas
Free Indirect
THE NOVEL IN A POSTFICTIONAL AGE
Timothy Bewes
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup . columbia . edu
Copyright © 2022 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Names: Bewes, Timothy, author.
Title: Free indirect : the novel in a postfictional age / Timothy Bewes.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2022. | Series: Literature now |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021054788 (print) | LCCN 2021054789 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231191609
(hardback) | ISBN 9780231192972 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231549479 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Fiction—H istory and criticism. | Fiction genres—P hilosophy. |
Postmodernism (Literature)
Classification: LCC PN3347 .B49 2022 (print) | LCC PN3347 (ebook) |
DDC 809.3— dc23/eng/20211117
LC record available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2021054788
LC ebook record available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2021054789
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-f ree paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns
Cover image: Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images /
Bridgeman Images. © 2021 C. Herscovici /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
For t.

The bottom has dropped out.
—J. M. COETZEE
The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even
believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half
concerned us. . . . The link between man and the world is broken.
—GILLES DELEUZE