“A Bridge is an Utterance”: Abstract Reasoning in Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig
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Ralf Haekel
Abstract
Adrian Duncan’s second novel A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) marks a departure from ‘typical’ Irish topics such as national identity and religion. This he shares with a range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel’s focus on architecture and engineering, which also looms large in Duncan’s other novels Love Notes from a German Building Site and The Geometer Lobachevsky, is unique, as it leads to unusual reflections on the nature of material culture. This original approach to the novel form should be considered as part of the current international trend to integrate theoretical reflections on a wide range of topics, thus negotiating contemporary cultures of knowledge. The novel’s international outlook moves away from ‘typical’ Irish topics of national identity and religion shared by a wider range of contemporary Irish authors, particularly those writing in the aftermath of the Celtic-Tiger years. The novel is thus also a reflection on the collapse of old systems, be they political, social, or epistemological, and the existential uncertainty created by their demise. I argue in my paper that Duncan’s novel addresses questions of knowledge formation that bear a striking resemblance to the Romantic novel as an open and generically hybrid form. I read it in a wider context as part of an ongoing experience of crisis: my overall thesis aims at describing the contemporary tendency to include abstract reflections that interrupt the narrative sequence as an expression of a fundamental crisis of knowledge. Today’s mediascape represents the contemporary world in a state of severe emergency, whose symptoms, be they climate change, the rise of nationalism and the far right, ultimately lead to a fundamental experience of contingency. Novels like Duncan’s can thus be seen as an expression of the crisis of the contemporary media ecology of knowledge.
Correction note
Correction added after publication in December 2023: The DOI of this article has been corrected to: 10.1515/ang-2023-4321.
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© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Abstract Reflection in Contemporary Fiction
- “A Bridge is an Utterance”: Abstract Reasoning in Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig
- The Mercurial Effects of Abstract Reflection: Troubling Hegemonic Cultures of Knowledge in Ted Chiang’s Short Math Fiction and Richard Powers’s Maximalist Arboreal Novel
- Reflections on Music in Fiction: Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (1999), Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016) and Roger Scruton’s Perictione in Colophon (2000)
- Riddling Word Games and Biblical Allusions in “Against a Wen”
- Laughing at Vampire Novels: Gothic Horror, Teen Girl Agency, and the Old and New Northanger Abbey
- Jean Rhys’s Cocktails and the Blurring of Literary Meridians
- Post-Postfeminist Witnessing: Sexual Violence and 9/11 in Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Rondine Al Nido”
- Reviews
- Todd Preston. 2022. A Handbook of Animals in Old English Texts. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, i + 199 pp., £107.00 | $129.00.
- Sarah Wood. 2022. Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition. York; Woodbridge: York Medieval Press; Boydell Press. York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 5. xiv + 234 pp., 6 illus., £80.00 | $115.00 Hardcover, £24.99 | $29.95 Ebook.
- Jessie Hock. 2021. The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 234 pp., $59.95.
- Mario Klarer (ed.). 2022. Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 416 pp., 35 illustr., $35.00.
- Julia Nitz. 2020. Belles and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women. Southern Literary Studies Series. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 296 pp., $55.00.
- Sämi Ludwig, Astrid Starck-Adler and André Karliczek (eds.). 2022. Colors and Cultures: Interdisciplinary Explorations / Couleurs et Cultures: Explorations Interdisciplinaires. Jena: Salana, 364 pp., €30.84.
- Matthew Clark and James Phelan. 2020. Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 256 pp., $99.95.
- Books Reviewed: Anglia 141 (2023)
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: Abstract Reflection in Contemporary Fiction
- “A Bridge is an Utterance”: Abstract Reasoning in Adrian Duncan’s A Sabbatical in Leipzig
- The Mercurial Effects of Abstract Reflection: Troubling Hegemonic Cultures of Knowledge in Ted Chiang’s Short Math Fiction and Richard Powers’s Maximalist Arboreal Novel
- Reflections on Music in Fiction: Rose Tremain’s Music and Silence (1999), Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (2016) and Roger Scruton’s Perictione in Colophon (2000)
- Riddling Word Games and Biblical Allusions in “Against a Wen”
- Laughing at Vampire Novels: Gothic Horror, Teen Girl Agency, and the Old and New Northanger Abbey
- Jean Rhys’s Cocktails and the Blurring of Literary Meridians
- Post-Postfeminist Witnessing: Sexual Violence and 9/11 in Claire Vaye Watkins’s “Rondine Al Nido”
- Reviews
- Todd Preston. 2022. A Handbook of Animals in Old English Texts. Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, i + 199 pp., £107.00 | $129.00.
- Sarah Wood. 2022. Piers Plowman and its Manuscript Tradition. York; Woodbridge: York Medieval Press; Boydell Press. York Manuscript and Early Print Studies 5. xiv + 234 pp., 6 illus., £80.00 | $115.00 Hardcover, £24.99 | $29.95 Ebook.
- Jessie Hock. 2021. The Erotics of Materialism: Lucretius and Early Modern Poetics. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 234 pp., $59.95.
- Mario Klarer (ed.). 2022. Barbary Captives: An Anthology of Early Modern Slave Memoirs by Europeans in North Africa. New York: Columbia University Press, 416 pp., 35 illustr., $35.00.
- Julia Nitz. 2020. Belles and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women. Southern Literary Studies Series. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 296 pp., $55.00.
- Sämi Ludwig, Astrid Starck-Adler and André Karliczek (eds.). 2022. Colors and Cultures: Interdisciplinary Explorations / Couleurs et Cultures: Explorations Interdisciplinaires. Jena: Salana, 364 pp., €30.84.
- Matthew Clark and James Phelan. 2020. Debating Rhetorical Narratology: On the Synthetic, Mimetic, and Thematic Aspects of Narrative. Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 256 pp., $99.95.
- Books Reviewed: Anglia 141 (2023)
