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The Novel Is a Theory of Allegory
- The Eighteenth Century
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Volume 61, Number 2, Summer 2020
- pp. 263-279
- 10.1353/ecy.2020.0018
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
Abstract: This essay approaches the eighteenth-century novel via debates in twentieth century theories of representationalism. At the core of these debates is a critical genealogy stemming from Michael Fried's "Art and Objecthood" (1967), one whose commitments are most powerfully on display in Steven Knapp's neglected Personification and the Sublime and its transformation of the anxiety about literalist art into an anxiety about allegory. What made eighteenth-century writers uncomfortable about Miltonic allegory, says Knapp, was its literalism; and thus the category of "literature" came to be defined by its power to defeat allegorical personhood. Angus Fletcher had made a similar claim about the realist novel in Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964). For Robbe-Grillet, however—whose Pour un nouveau roman precedes "Art and Objecthood" by four years, anticipating Fried's claims but on behalf of objecthood—the realist novel's attention to detail is the apotheosis of allegorical literalism. This is how and why Kafka is a realist. It is also, I argue, the realism of Jane Austen. Zadie Smith influentially sketches out two paths for the novel, with Robbe-Grillet and Austen moving along vectors that will never meet. But there is only one path for the novel.