Humanities Research Seminar: Formlessness and the Theory of the Novel

The problem of ‘formlessness’ is one that has long been central to the history of attempts to theorise the novel as a literary form. Ian Watt in his seminal 1957 The Rise of the Novel refers, for example, to ‘[w]hat is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode’, a feeling of formlessness which, he goes on to argue, is perhaps ‘the price it must pay for its realism.’ Similarly, Georg Lukacs, from his very earliest writings of the 1900s, relates this to the novel’s struggles with the necessity of form as that which ‘sets limits around a substance which otherwise would dissolve into air’, and so is able to ‘form something new out of formlessness’. Drawing on some recent developments in the novel, particularly in examples of so-called ‘autofiction’, this paper will explore the question of how we are to understand the social dimensions of the apparently formless as itself an issue of literary or artistic form and thus as an expression of historical experience under capitalism.

Host or Publisher College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UoW