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The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel de Paul Dawson

The Story of Fictional Truth: Realism from the Death to the Rise of the Novel: Theory and Interpretation of Narrative

Autor Paul Dawson
en Limba Engleză Hardback – 15 feb 2023
In The Story of Fictional Truth, Paul Dawson looks anew at the historical relationship between the genre of the novel and the concept of fictionality, arguing that existing scholarship on the emergence of realist fiction has been shaped by the trope of the death of the novel. The unexplored logic of this premise is that the novel was born anticipating its own demise, with both its requiem and its reflexive origins legible in the ontological challenge of postmodern metafiction. To test this logic, Dawson traces shifting assumptions about what constitutes the illusion of fictional truth from early novels such as The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) to contemporary autofiction such as Megan Boyle’s Liveblog (2018). In doing so, he contests and revises long-held views about the origins and functions of key formal features of the realist novel by investigating when and how they came to be seen as signposts of fictionality. Through this history, The Story of Fictional Truth opens up new ways to understand the novel’s afterlife in a post-truth digital age characterized by a collapse of referentiality. 
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Specificații

ISBN-13: 9780814215470
ISBN-10: 0814215475
Pagini: 282
Ilustrații: 1 image
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 23 mm
Greutate: 0.45 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Ohio State University Press
Seria Theory and Interpretation of Narrative

Recenzii

“The Story of Fictional Truth powerfully establishes new bases of connection between narratology and novel studies. Dawson’s deep theoretical expertise confirms his position as a leading figure in both fields. Challenging the impulse to ascribe absolute representational effects to narrative modes, Dawson gives us an important new literary history of the novel.” —Dorothy Hale, author of The Novel and the New Ethics 

Notă biografică

Paul Dawson is Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of three books, including The Return of the Omniscient Narrator: Authorship and Authority in Twenty-First Century Fiction. 

Extras

If literary genres are in some way symptomatic of larger social and intellectual currents, so too is literary theory, and the point of departure for this book is the shift in theoretical emphasis that took place between Ian Watt’s pithily titled field-defining work, The Rise of the Novel (1957), and Catherine Gallagher’s revisionist response “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006). The line of scholarship that Gallagher exemplifies is characterized by a critical anxiety of influence, offering a misprision, or creative misreading of Watt’s thesis, reimagining realism by foregrounding its ostensible antithesis: fictionality. According to Gallagher, “what Ian Watt called ‘formal realism’ was not a way of trying to hide or disguise fictionality; realism was, rather, understood to be fiction’s formal sign”. This claim marks a shift in novel theory from formal realism to what I will dub reflexive realism. How did a definition of the novel as the authentic representation of individual experience rendered in referential language become inverted such that the novel is understood as an inherently self-reflexive genre openly trading on the fictive status of its characters—and how do we approach novelistic form as a result? If the formal features of the realist novel overtly signal its fictionality, we need a view of literary history that can account not only for the “rise” of realist fiction in the eighteenth century but for its development in the ensuing centuries in order to explain why, at this juncture, the novel’s self-reflexive origins needed to be revealed. In his study of the dynamic forms of plotting in narrative fiction, Peter Brooks invokes the Freudian death drive to argue that the “strange logic” of narrative is constituted by the anticipation of retrospection: a desire to reach the end of a story we know to have already been completed, upon which final meaning can be conferred. My argument is that scholarship on the much-debated rise of the novel must be understood alongside another persistent and perpetually contested trope: the death of the novel. The two are mutually constitutive, emerging at the same time to shape our understanding of novelistic history, for, as I will demonstrate, canonical histories of the novel’s origins implant a death drive in its form, one conditioned by an awareness of the ostensible exhaustion of realism in twentieth-century literature.

The theory of reflexive realism, as I will call it, takes shape in the 1980s in the work of scholars such as Michael McKeon (1987) and John Bender (1987), framing the novel as a paradoxical reflection on the artifice of its own mimetic enterprise that emerged in the eighteenth century alongside a new conceptual category of fictionality. This approach to the origins of the realist novel, I contend, was anticipated and made possible by the self-reflexive exposure of fictionality that characterizes postmodern metafiction, prompting scholars to assert that reflexivity is a condition of all fiction. Wenche Ommundsen (1993), for instance, argues that “metafiction is the product of a certain practice of reading, a particular kind of attention brought to bear on the fictional text”. Reflexive realism is the result of this practice of reading brought to bear on the history of the novel: it reads backward from its own historical moment to recast the origins of the novel in terms legible to contemporary theory, rescuing realism from enforced naïvety by revealing that its emergence depended upon an awareness rather than a suppression of its own fictional status. McKeon (2017), for example, has come to describe formal features of the novel, such as narratorial intrusions and Free Indirect Discourse (FID), as “expressions of realist reflexivity”. In this light, the narrative methods of “formal realism” established in this self-consciously new species of writing can be seen as embedded signposts of fictionality carrying a latent challenge to their own promise of representational correspondence. The historical logic of such a premise is that the novel proleptically establishes the conditions for its own death, the moment at which the paradox of realism can no longer be sustained, and is stripped bare by postmodern artifice. The trope of the death of the novel that shapes metafictional responses to the exhaustion of realism thus provides the impetus not only for reconsidering the origins of the form but for revealing that its origins lie in its own end point.

Cuprins

Introduction    Literary History and the Theory of Reflexive Realism
Chapter 1        From Digressions to Intrusions: The Historical Paradox of Authorial Commentary
Chapter 2        Against Sympathy: The Self-Examining Heroine and the Origins of Free Indirect Discourse
Chapter 3        Interiority and the End of Consciousness: From the Conduct Scene to the Sex Scene
Chapter 4        Dying to Tell About It: The Autothanatographic Impulse of First-Person Narration
Chapter 5        Beyond the Threshold: Accounting for the Self as Other
Conclusion      The Exhaustion of Fictionality: Metamodernism and the (Auto)Fictional Pact

Descriere

In The Story of Fictional Truth, Paul Dawson looks anew at the historical relationship between the genre of the novel and the concept of fictionality, arguing that existing scholarship on the emergence of realist fiction has been shaped by the trope of the death of the novel. The unexplored logic of this premise is that the novel was born anticipating its own demise, with both its requiem and its reflexive origins legible in the ontological challenge of postmodern metafiction. To test this logic, Dawson traces shifting assumptions about what constitutes the illusion of fictional truth from early novels such as The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) to contemporary autofiction such as Megan Boyle’s Liveblog (2018). In doing so, he contests and revises long-held views about the origins and functions of key formal features of the realist novel by investigating when and how they came to be seen as signposts of fictionality. Through this history, The Story of Fictional Truth opens up new ways to understand the novel’s afterlife in a post-truth digital age characterized by a collapse of referentiality.