Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure
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Andreas Mahler
Andreas Mahler is Professor of English Literature and Literary Systematics at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. His main research areas are early modern literature, the shift from realism to modernism, textual poetics, and literary theory (semiotics, intermediality, literary anthropology, and aesthetics). He has published on early modern satire, comedy and comedies, genre theory, the city, and the question of epochs in literature.
Abstract
This essay argues that, from the point of view of literary genres, it is the novel that is most prone to the idea of ‘being continued’. Drawing on the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s third concept of reality, that of seeing reality as the (linear) ‘result of a realization’, largely determining the early modern and modern periods and making room for what he calls the ‘possibility of the novel’, the argument shows how the novelistic enterprise can never fully be brought to an end, since it always leaves open the possibility and option of (‘realizingly’) filling a gap of what has not been told yet. This is the novel’s problem of closure, which the history of the novel self-consciously has addressed in all its different forms and functions.
Abstract
This essay argues that, from the point of view of literary genres, it is the novel that is most prone to the idea of ‘being continued’. Drawing on the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s third concept of reality, that of seeing reality as the (linear) ‘result of a realization’, largely determining the early modern and modern periods and making room for what he calls the ‘possibility of the novel’, the argument shows how the novelistic enterprise can never fully be brought to an end, since it always leaves open the possibility and option of (‘realizingly’) filling a gap of what has not been told yet. This is the novel’s problem of closure, which the history of the novel self-consciously has addressed in all its different forms and functions.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
