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Toward an Aesthetics of Existence in the Contemporary Novel
- Journal of Modern Literature
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 38, Number 1, Fall 2014
- pp. 190-193
- 10.2979/jmodelite.38.1.190
- Review
- Additional Information
Arne De Boever’s Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel attempts to isolate the biopolitical characteristics of the novel. Analyzing the contemporary fiction of Coetzee, Ishiguro, Auster, and McCarthy, De Boever argues that the genre of the novel models the biopolitical relationship between sovereign and subjects in the novel’s author and his characters. Though his argument’s specificity to the novel as a genre is uncertain, his work addresses a formalist lacuna in recent biopolitical criticism and may be usefully generalized to other narrative genres.