Novel theory has dealt with – and,

Novel theory has dealt with – and, sometimes, denied – this fact invarious ways. Critics with a positivist bent tend to define the novel asanything satisfying the four cardinal requirements; the resultant big-tentapproach produces a criticism rediscovering with a certain reliability thevariety and multiplicity (Richardson
and
Kafka!) of this minimally definedform. Moretti’s two volumes of new criticism, which cover thousands of years and countless languages and national traditions, exemplify thisapproach, and whatever doubts one has about whether all of its essays areabout the same type of literary object, the sheer grandeur of the resultsconstitutes a compelling justification of the positivist method. Still, themost influential and powerful theorists of the form have taken a verydifferent tack – generating a vision of the form based on a few exemplars,and then generalizing this into a theory of ‘the’ novel. Many of the bignames assembled in McKeon’s and Hale’s collections of classic noveltheory make their cases based on a limited Western canon; the resultantvision of the novel as the genre par excellence of cognitive mapping isperhaps best summed up in Adorno’s remark (not, as it happens, collectedin any of these volumes) that ‘the novel’s true impulse [is] the attempt todecipher the riddle of external life’ (32). This idea of the novel as modernity’spre-eminent sense-making form reaches its apotheosis in Marxist criticism,but it informs this speculative – we might, given its relative dearth of interest in most actually existing narrative forms, almost call it metaphysical – tradition much more broadly

Hasil (Bahasa Indonesia) 1:

Teori baru telah berurusan dengan- dan, kadang-kadang, ditolak – fakta ini cara invarious. Kritikus dengan positivist membungkuk cenderung untuk mendefinisikan asanything novel yang memenuhi persyaratan Kardinal empat; resultan besar-tentapproach menghasilkan kritik menemukan kembali dengan keandalan thevariety tertentu dan keserbaragaman (Richardsondan Kafka!) of this minimally definedform. Moretti’s two volumes of new criticism, which cover thousands of years and countless languages and national traditions, exemplify thisapproach, and whatever doubts one has about whether all of its essays areabout the same type of literary object, the sheer grandeur of the resultsconstitutes a compelling justification of the positivist method. Still, themost influential and powerful theorists of the form have taken a verydifferent tack – generating a vision of the form based on a few exemplars,and then generalizing this into a theory of ‘the’ novel. Many of the bignames assembled in McKeon’s and Hale’s collections of classic noveltheory make their cases based on a limited Western canon; the resultantvision of the novel as the genre par excellence of cognitive mapping isperhaps best summed up in Adorno’s remark (not, as it happens, collectedin any of these volumes) that ‘the novel’s true impulse [is] the attempt todecipher the riddle of external life’ (32). This idea of the novel as modernity’spre-eminent sense-making form reaches its apotheosis in Marxist criticism,but it informs this speculative – we might, given its relative dearth of interest in most actually existing narrative forms, almost call it metaphysical – tradition much more broadly