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Lukács, Bakhtin and the Sociology of the Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Prabhakara Jha
Prabhakara Jha*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis

Extract

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For the last two centuries the novel has been the predominant literary genre; but the generic identity of the novel is far from established. Attempts to define the novel have focussed on formal features of particular types of texts, with the result that definitions of “the” novel have merely canonized one or another of the innumerable novelistic manifestations—Bildungsroman, eighteenth-century English novels, novels of the kind George Eliot or Henry James or Marcel Proust or Feodor Dostoevsky wrote, etc. By basing themselves upon such formal attributes, such definitions exclude a vast number of potential texts on essentially normative grounds. Further, the history of the novel has outgrown and contradicted those conceptions; no sooner than a theory has been formulated, the novel itself has moved forward, adapting to changing conditions and substituting for those formal properties a set of new ones, thus rendering the theories obsolete and revealing the inadequacy of formalist categories to define the genre. This predicament is certainly not unique to the theory of the novel but rather a necessary concomitant of any theoretical project; what makes any attempt to theorize about the novel particularly vulnerable is the genre's resistence to formalist analysis, its lack of precisely those organizing categories upon which a formalist theory of any genre can be built.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 33 , Issue 129 , March 1985 , pp. 63 - 90
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetik, Band II, Frankfurt, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1955, p. 452.

2 George Steiner, Language and Silence, London, Faber and Faber, 1966, p. 104.

3 Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination, New York, Doubleday, 1954.

4 W.J. Harvey, Character and the Novel, London, Chatto and Windus, 1965.

5 ibid., p. 24.

6 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, London, Chatto and Windus, 1963, p. 33.

7 Steiner, op. cit., pp. 421-422.

8 Trilling, op. cit., p. 255.

9 Hegel, op. cit., p. 452.

10 Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans, Neuwied, Luchterhand, 1962; The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1971.

11 Ibid., p. 12.

12 Michael Löwy, Georg Lukács-From Rorianticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller, London, New Left Books, 1979, pp. 16-22.

13 Ibid, p. 67.

14 Lukács, op. cit., p. 15.

15 Ibid., p. 33.

16 Ibid., p. 34.

17 Ibid., pp. 40-41.

18 Ibid., pp. 152-153.

19 Ferenc Feher, "Is the Novel Problematic?" Telos, No. 15, 1973, p. 48.

20 Lukács' later views on the novel are stated in several works written in the thrirties and the forties, but perhaps most succinctly in "Essay on the Novel", International Literature, No. 5 1936, and "Narrate or Describe?" in Georg Lukács, Writer and Critic, trans. A.D. Kahn, New York, Grosser and Dunlap, 1970.

21 Jacques Leenhardt, "Roman et Société: Discours et action dans la théorie lukacsienne du roman", in Semiotics and Dialectics: Ideology and the Text, ed. Peter V. Zima, Amsterdam, John Benjamins B.V., 1981, p. 369.

22 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968, pp. 83-111.

23 T.W. Adorno, Noten zur Literatur, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1958-1965; Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, New York, The Seabury Press, 1972.

24 Lucien Goldmann, Pour une sociologie du roman, Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1964; Towards a Sociology of the Novel, trans. Alan Sheridan, London, Tavistock, 1975.

25 Ibid., pp. 10-11.

26 This point is suggested by Jacques Leenhardt in an interview published in Diacritics, September 1977, and also in "Lecture critique de la théorie goldmannien ne du roman", in Sociocritique, ed. Claude Duchet, Paris, Editions Nathan, 1979.

27 Goldmann, "The Theatre of Genet", The Drama Review, No. 12, 1968.

28 Jacques Leenhardt, Lecture politique du roman, Paris, Editions Minuit, 1973.

29 This is reported by William Boelhower in a review article, "Towards a Sociology of the Novel", The Minnesota Review, Spring 1976.

30 M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981.

31 P.N. Medvedev/M.M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Albert J. Wehrle, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

32 Ibid., p. 3.

33 Ibid., p. 3-4.

34 ibid., p. 8.

35 Ibid., pp. 16-17.

36 Ibid., p. 18.

37 V.N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I.R. Titunik, New York, Seminar Press, 1973.

38 M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ardis, 1973.

39 Ibid., p. 23.

40 A.V. Lunacharsky, On Literature and Art, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1973, pp. 79-107.

41 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.

42 Julia Kristeva "The Ruin of a Poetics", in Russian Formalism, ed. Stephen Bann and J.E. Bowlt, Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1973.

43 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 11.

44 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, Trans. W. Task, New York, Doubleday, 1957.

45 Ibid., p. 24.

46 Ibid., p. 26.

47 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, pp. 97-98.

48 Medvedev/Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, p. 27.

49 Jacques Leenhardt, "Lecture critique de la théorie goldmannienne du roman", p. 180 (translation mine).

50 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 366-367.

51 Jacques Leenhardt, "Lecture critique de la théorie goldmannienne du roman", p. 182 (translation mine).