Theory and the Novel (ACLA 2022)
What does a novel do? Recent theoretical work on the novel has tended to emphasize the novel’s facility for world-making—for the organization of all its different elements within a global whole (Cheah / Hayot / Woloch). Figured as a composite of relations, the novel is ascribed a constructive conceptuality (Levine / Kornbluh). The novel makes a world. Perhaps some of the strongest, recent theorizations of the novel along these lines, in literary criticism, have come from within new formalism—a formalist movement with roots in both New Criticism and Marxist literary criticism.