The Thought of Literature: Notes to Contemporary Fictions

The Thought of Literature Notes to contemporary fictions Jason Childs A dissertation submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Technology Sydney, February 2018. Certificate of original authorship I certify that the work in this thesis has not previously been submitted for a degree nor has it been submitted as part of requirements for a degree except as acknowledged within the text. I also certify that the thesis has been written by me. Any help that I have received in my research work and the preparation of the thesis itself has been acknowledged. In addition, I certify that all information sources and literature used are indicated in the thesis. This research is supported by an Austalian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Signature of Candidate: Production Note: Signature removed prior to publication. February 20, 2018 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I am deeply grateful to Robyn Ferrell for taking over my supervision at a late stage in my candidature. Her feedback on my ideas and drafts, always generous and incisive, was invaluable in completing this work. Without Berndt Sellheim’s encouragement, I would not have begun this project; without his support, I would not have finished it. I am blessed to call him my friend. Martin Harrison was an important mentor for several years prior to starting this work and my supervisor during its defining early stages. Fellow students of Martin's will understand when I say that, despite his untimely death in 2014, there is not a sentence here that wasn’t written in conversation with him. I am thankful to have had the time with him that I did. I have been extremely lucky to have Astrid Lorange, Brenton Lyle and Rory Dufficy as friends and colleagues over the years of my doctoral studies. I owe them thanks both for their detailed and sensitive responses to this work at various stages and for the inspiring example they provide as writers and scholars. I am also grateful to the Goethe Institute for a scholarship it provided in 2013. This allowed me to travel to Berlin, which later, during the period in which much of this thesis was composed, became home. For support of less direct but essential kinds—from a kind word well-timed to a well-deserved kick in the pants to the occasional roof over my head—I must also thank my friends James Delahunty, Ameika Johnson, Hugo Chiarella, Gabrielle Scawthorne and Mary Chiarella. For their kindness and patience over the past year, I thank Annie and Bernd François-Langbein. That I can undertake such a project at all, I owe to my deeply argumentative family—especially to my father Marc, my late mother Lynette, and my sisters Kate and Naomi. Each, in their own way, has been a model for the creativity and resilience that this dissertation required. Above all, I thank my fiancée Marion Desgranges for her enormous behind-the-scenes contribution to this work, as well as for her daily reassurances and her belief in me. The home we have created together made this work possible. Last but not least, I thank Wilson—for his oblivion to human concerns and for his constant readiness to play. Contents Introduction: The Thought of Literature 1 Philosophy and Literature 50 Philosophy and/or/as literature 51 Identity and nonidentity 70 Literature beyond philosophy 87 Truth and Fiction 125 Reality versus fiction 126 Reality as fiction 138 Fiction and imagination 154 Literary knowledge 172 Novel and Essay 197 The novel as essay 198 The essay as novel 227 Afterword 259 Bibliography 312 Abstract This dissertation begins by describing the contemporary moment in letters as one marked by ambiguity and blockage: at the same time as the line between creative and critical writing has become blurry, anxieties about the meaning and vocation of literature have become acute. It then identifies a group of authors who respond to this moment in a highly self-conscious way: among others, Don DeLillo, J.M. Coetzee, Ben Lerner, Karl Ove Knausgaard, John D’Agata, and David Shields. While diverse in approach, these authors are united by their insistence on the cognitive purview and the critical vocation of literature. As a heuristic for thinking about their recent works, I propose the generic category of the ‘post-fictional essay’. Yet it is a category that I admit is problematic. Such works are notable, I argue, precisely for a thinking of this aporetic moment, and thus for the pressure they place upon our critical and experiential vocabularies; they call on critical activity to account for, indeed to transform, itself. Rather than proceeding with a detailed literary-critical account of these works, then, I offer an analysis of some of the concepts and categories in which post-fictional essays, if such existed, might be said to intervene, and of the epistemic ambiguities that might be said to occasion them. This dissertation comprises three main sections, each of which elaborates and problematises an entrenched opposition: ‘Literature and Philosophy’, ‘Truth and Fiction’, ‘Novel and Essay’. Respectively, these sections draw primarily on the resources of Frankfurt School critical theory, reader response theory, and genre studies. The title of this work—The Thought of Literature— describes a tripartite preoccupation that informs the investigation throughout: I am concerned with questions, first, about the cognitive content of literature; second, about literature as a distinctive modality of cognition; and third, about literature as an institutional, epistemic and generic category. My central question is: What is the thought of literature? Since this dissertation could not extricate itself from the ambiguous moment it seeks to describe, the complexity of the answer I assay is partly reflected in this work’s own paratactic mode of presentation. 1 Introduction: The Thought of Literature 2 Nothing and everything “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.”1 So begins Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory—the unfinished final work of a career spent accounting for the intertwined fates of art and reason. It is a diagnosis of modern disorientation in relation to the meaning and status of art that, while advanced in the late 1960s, in the context of a high modernism that may seem somewhat remote to us—though perhaps less surely relegated to the past than some critics have suggested2—remains every bit as apt today. In the literary sphere, one index of that insecurity is the proliferation of essays worrying whether literature has a future—or, somewhat more dramatically, announcing its death. On the one hand, these are nothing new: by the 1820s, G.W.F. Hegel had already declared art—and he was thinking of Romantic literature as its most developed instantiation—“a thing of the past [ein Vergangenes]”.3 For Hegel, as J.M. Bernstein puts it, art ends because “it loses its capacity to speak the truth concerning our most fundamental categorial engagements and commitments”.4 Such a claim has, usually in somewhat less sophisticated terms, been playing on increasing rotation ever since. Indeed, the deadpan titles of two recent essays indicate their authors’ ironic awareness that the literary death notice has itself come to form a fairly stable literary genre: Tao Lin’s ‘Does the Novel Have a Future? The Answer Is In This Essay!’ and Will Self’s ‘The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)’.5 It is ironic that this 1 Adorno, T.W., Aesthetic Theory, trans. G. Adorno, R. Tiedemann & R. Hullot-Kentor, New York: Continuum, 2004, p.1. 2 “Modernism is our antiquity,” writes T.J. Clark in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, p.3. A similar claim runs through Fredric Jameson’s The Ancients and the Postmoderns: On the Historicity of Forms, New York: Verso, 2015. 3 Hegel, G.W.F, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, p.11. Discussions of this influential claim are to be found in many places. An accessible general account that also examines the relationship between Hegel’s thesis and romantic literature can be found in Wicks, R., ‘Hegel’s Aesthetics: An overview’, The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, ed. F.C. Beiser, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.348-377. Another general discussion can be found in Bowie, A., Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, pp.140-187. Two recent works that ‘apply’ the end-of-art thesis within a discussion of modernism and contemporary art include Pippin, R., After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, and Danto, A., The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 4 Bernstein, J.M., The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida to Adorno, New York: Polity Press, 1993, p.5. 5 Lin, T., ‘Does the Novel Have a Future? The Answer Is In This Essay!’, The Observer, April 19, 2011, http://observer.com/2011/04/does-the-novel-have-a-future-the-answer-is-in-this-essay, last viewed 3 genre has appeared to flourish precisely as its claims have arguably become most convincing: that is, as contemporary communication technologies have come to further disrupt the screen-dominated media ecology whose advent it was already widely feared would prove cataclysmic for what Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy. To put it mildly, there can be no doubt that literature has been pushed to “the margins of the defining media of our time”.6 In his essay ‘Changing Functions of Literature’, first published in 1986, Wolfgang Iser echoes Adorno’s observation: “The place of literature in modern society is something that can no longer be taken for granted,” he writes.

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