...Timothy Bewes © 2011 by Novel, Inc. 2011 Duke University Press The Novel Problematic TIMOTHY BEWES I want to take up Jennifer Fleissner’s suggestion that the scholarly focus of a Soci- ety for Novel Studies, in the age of The Sopranos and The Wire, might...

...Marianne DeKoven The term history gathers to itself, and disperses, as troubled and complex a nexus of theory, ideology and practice as any term in our critical vocabulary. Yet I argue here that this term is as inevitable and necessary as it is problematic, especially in discussions of the novel...

..., socialist bildungsromane sought to provide the traditional form of the bildungsroman with a genuinely internationalist horizon. The genre of the socialist bildungsroman encodes the checkered history of socialism, in particular the problematic of a revolutionary temporality as well as the fraught...

... makes the realist novel historical through the representation of motion as vertiginous sensation and as a problematic register of experience. The very uncertainty of the sensation of motion evokes history as a horizon rather than as a causal sequence. The term vection came to be used later...

... of decolonization, recurring problematics that nonetheless make the case for its existence as a distinct genre. No novel better emblematizes this genre than William Gardner Smith's The Stone Face (1963). Smith's novel is read as an attempt to narrativize the problem of intersectionality for a revolutionary...

... constitutes markers of a story that can be categorized as historical fiction, this essay reads Truong's treatment of these figures as the vehicle through which she problematizes the act of giving a particular experience or subject historical presence. The essay explores how Truong uses Stein's modernist...

... intangibility. Still, the true miracle in the novel is the reformation caused by the girl's superfluous writing. By thus staging a fable of domestication through verbal manners, Pamela contributes, decisively but problematically, to the consolidation of domestic fiction. Both the residual omnipresence...

... of Japanese domestic politics. More suggestively, Chesterton problematically demarcates too fast a distinction between an Orientalist writing that makes serious, and therefore falsifiable, claims about its subject, and one whose engagement with the Orient is so fanciful as to disclaim any such accountability...

... and states, the white and the nonwhite, the sovereign and the subordinate, Elmer leads us to see the extent to which “[t]he ideological space of the new world that [his] texts depict is not . . . a solution to, or ‘exoneration’ of, a European problematic, but that problematic’s more intense...

.../or alternatives have been long ago deconstructed. Nevertheless, she still must contend with the problematic articulated by Sartre, if not with his solution: how to shift the conversation on African novels in a way that does better justice to the internal priorities of the field itself and how to do so while still...

... problematic and highly ambivalent account of racial otherness.1 And yet, as often with intriguing, complex, and passionate cases, the unexpected discovery of a new perspective to revisit central evidence to the case can not only justify a reopening of the dossier; it can perhaps also reframe the very...

... scientists and a documentary film, Marc Singer's Dark Days ), because, in addition to the insights the chapter offers as it defamiliarizes and then refamiliarizes the components of domesticity, it also points to a problematic around which the book circles. One of the book's central premises...

... of textual effects that cannot be known in advance, whose forms will need to be discovered and reasoned through, all in terms that will no doubt themselves be contested. The problematic of identity is not of course left behind. But the reading no longer primarily seeks to confirm the construction of identity...

... European tradition running from the bildungsro- man of Goethe up through the intensifying ‘‘problematization’’ of the Bildung structure in the works of (for them) contemporary authors such as Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Alfred Do¨blin, Marcel Proust, Andre´ Gide, and Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line. Later...

... such questions would be through a critical attention to the problematic of abstrac- tion apparent in Lukács’s early writings. Or, more precisely, a certain relation of abstraction to the concrete at work within them. It would hardly be a revelation to note that a certain account of abstraction is indeed...

... that structures such a model of critique remains transcendental and a priori to one’s enactment of it. The ur-example here is Althusser’s adoption of Jacques Martin’s concept of a problematic (problematique) ‘‘to designate a particular unity of a theoretical for- mation and hence the location to be assigned...

... ). If poetics are dead, it is because God is dead, and, with God, the possibility for any metaphysical point of view. The novel's very problematization of the narrative point of view—“every point of novelistic view, even that of the most omniscient of narrators, always coexists with other epicenters of sense...

... notion of influence. This aspect of Derrida's work informs Roughley's analysis deeply in its best moments, although it occasionally undermines his attempts to address Joyce and Derrida as a pair bound by influence. Roughley most directly encounters this problematic when analyzing Derrida's...

... these years built up to another global massacre. Throughout these discussions, World War I remains a steady presence, a bass line of violence reverberating both forward and back. By exploring the constant eruption of violence across the period, Cole emphasizes how thoroughly, in her words, “the problematic...

... texts, The Corrections suggests that either his criteria are incomplete and need at least one additional characteristic, or his application of them is not sufficiently discriminating to distinguish between long books and maximalist novels. Ercolino appears to recognize the problematic nature...