"[T]his collection is interesting and timely, and the attempt of many of the essays to re-establish what their authors usually call a humanistic criticism is a welcome and useful provocation." Donald Gray
In this series of essays from Novel: A Forum on Fiction, a pantheon of scholars explores the conflict between "humanist" and "posthumanist" responses to questions about the novel's relevancy in postmodern times.
Acknowledgments
Mark Spilka and Caroline McCracken-Flesher
Preliminaries
I. The New Series
Poetics Panel
Marianna Torgovnick
"The Present and Future States of Novel Criticism": A Hopeful Overview
Mark Spilka
"Still Towards a Poetics of Fiction?": NoAnd Then Again Yes
Don H. Bialostosky
Booth's Rhetoric, Bakhtin's Dialogics and the Future of Novel Criticism
Bernard Duyfhuizen
Mimesis, Authority, and Belief in Narrative Poetics: Toward a Transmission Theory for a Poetics of Fiction
Richard Pearce
"The Present and Future States of Novel Criticism": Our Two-Headed Profession
Daniel R. Schwarz
The Case for a Humanistic Poetics
II. Four Precursors
Roy Pascal
Narrative Fictions and Reality: A Comment on Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending
Terrence Doody
Don Quixote, Ulysses, and the Idea of Realism
Nancy Armstrong
The Rise of Feminine Authority in the Novel
Steven Cohan
Figures beyond the Text: A Theory of Readable Character in the Novel
III. The Conference
The Editors
Why the Novel Matters: A Postmodern Perplex
Keynote Address
David Lodge
The Novel Now: Theories and Practices
The Novel as Subjective Mode
Leo Bersani
Flaubert's Encyclopedism
Kaja Sivlerman
Too Early/Too Late: Subjectivity and the Primal Scene in Henry James
Alan Singer
The Voice of History/The Subject of the Novel
The Novel as Ethical Paradigm
Patricia Meyer Spacks
The Novel as Ethical Paradigm
Robert Scholes
The Novel as Ethical Paradigm?
Daniel R. Schwarz
The Ethics of Reading: The Case for Pluralistic and Transactional Reading
The Novel as Cultural Discourse
George Levine
The Novel as Scientific Discourse: The Example of Conrad
Khachig Tololyan
Discoursing with Culture: The Novel as Interlocutor
Charles Altieri
Finnegans Wake as Modernist Historiography
The Novel as Therapeutic Discourse
Joseph Gold
The Function of Fiction: A Biological Model
Murray M. Schwartz
Beyond Fantasy: The Novel as Play
Susan Rubin Suleiman
Playing and Modernity
Discussion
The Novel as Psychosocial Design
Peter Brooks
The Tale vs. The Novel
Robert Caserio
Mobility and Masochism: Christine Brooke-Rose and J.G. Ballard
Nancy K. Miller
Feminist Writing and the History of the Novel
The Novel as Narrative Process
Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Feminist Narrative in Virginia Woolf
Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth
Conspicuous Construction: or, Kristeva, Nabokov, and the Anti-Realist Critique
The Windup Session
Marianna Torgovnick
Did We Meet Your Expectations?
Discussion
Contributors
Index
