Essayistic Forms of Life in the Anglophone Novel from the 18th to the 21st Century

• Applicant: Dr. Alexander Scherr
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 495041335

This research project examines culturally and historically distinct representations of essayistic forms of life in anglophone novels from the 18th to the 21st century. Although the novel has been studied as a medium in which forms of life are modelled, hardly any attention has thus far been paid to representations of essayism in the history of anglophone fiction. The persistence of this lacuna is surprising as essayism is a form of life par excellence which, since the early modern period, has challenged hegemonic knowledge cultures by privileging fragmentary, unsystematic and open encounters with objects of research. By studying essayistic life-forms in the novel, the project conducts a critical re-examination of modern knowledge cultures. In so doing, it enriches topical interdisciplinary debates on anti-dogmatic ways of knowing which have recently been linked to phenomena such as 'slowness', 'resonance' and 'quietness'. In light of the ongoing search for theoretical approaches beyond the paradigm of 'critique' (advocated most prominently by Rita Felski), essayism is reassessed as a type of (post-)critical theory that maintains a utopian impulse while being highly aware of the affordances of 'forms' (sensu Caroline Levine) in intellectual projects.By exploring how essayism has impacted the history of the anglophone novel, the projected study recalibrates the fraught relationship between novel studies and narratology. It revises established accounts of the novel by calling attention to unduly neglected essayistic lineages of this literary form, including the essay-novel’s pre-modernist roots, its (queer-)feminist legacy and its striking return in the 21st century. For the purpose of analysing essayistic novels, the project retools several of narratology's most cherished concepts (such as 'plot', 'event' and 'closure'), seeing that these categories have hitherto largely been modelled on the basis of the realist novel. A key question that will inform the readings of various essayistic novels (roughly from Jonathan Swift's /A Tale of a Tub/ to Valeria Luiselli's /Lost Children Archive/) is how novels rely on specific narrative means to articulate what it means to write, think and live essayistically. Encompassing three main theoretical dimensions, the project understands essayism: a) as a modern form of life and an anti-dogmatic principle of knowledge (interdisciplinary dimension); b) as a transgeneric aesthetic mode that has impacted the history of the novel (literary- and genre-theoretical dimension); c) as a specific attitude to narrative (narratological dimension). These three dimensions will help to delineate the epistemic and ethical value of essayistic forms of life, and to reassess their significance in the context of the fast-paced knowledge cultures of the 21st-century university.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants