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On that Oft-Predicted End of the Novel

I wish I had time to make some comments on the Boston Review’s think-piece essay on the death of the novel, but for now all I can do is point you to it. This is the on-sentence summary:

There is no crisis of realism in contemporary fiction; there is only a crisis of ownership.

That’s about as good of a slogan as I’ve seen regarding the perennial entombment of all that is novelistic. If you like that, read the whole thing. Suffice to say, there’s oodles of Bakhtin (and well-quoted/summarized Bakhtin), plus some Woolf, Bloom, etc, even a little Wood, all gracefully deployed and well-synthesized.

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May 17th, 2011 | Tags: , , | Category: Uncategorized

4 comments to On that Oft-Predicted End of the Novel

  • P.
    May 18, 2011 at 4:13 am · Reply

    It’s really sad that argument breaks down finally into, read more critics and writers of color and stop feeling guilty you white people in your gated Brooklyn-Cambridge community…

    Which is to say, it was a singularly bad article of precisely the sort it was singling out as ineffective.

  • Stephen
    May 19, 2011 at 12:20 am · Reply

    Foucault is great but as Charles Taylor easily demonstrated it’s turtles all the way down. Was this written in the 90′s ? If so, the writer could be forgiven because they did not known that there is never any end to Paris ?

  • Stephen
    May 19, 2011 at 12:33 am · Reply

    And Famished Road is amazing, nonetheless.

  • Stephen
    May 19, 2011 at 12:38 am · Reply

    This was published in Boston ?

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