Novel Typology through Historical Lenses
Points: Abstract Synthesis in writing
novel.
Dilthey’s method was having traces of
Kantian philosophy.
It showed a kind of inclination
towards irrational-ism.
Hegelian influence in theory of novel:
1.
Mode of totality in epic and dramatic
art.
2.
One important legacy of Hegel is the
historicisation of aesthetic categories.
3.
Towards a general dialectic of
literary genres.
4.
Question of life & relation to
essence in epics
5.
World of platonic forms and
methodological archetypes.
Frederic Jameson on Georg Lukács:
- As a cultural object, Marxism returns itself against general activity in general to devalue it and lay bare its class privileges and the leisure which it presupposes for its enjoyment.
- Hegelian Lukács of the Theory of the novel
- The chief conceptual opposition within which all of the examinations of literature have taken place is the famous Hegelian one of the concrete and abstract.
- Epic, Tragedy and platonic philosophies.
- Abstract idealism of Novel typology. How Don Quixote differs … Heroes of abstract idealism no longer find their justification in the moment of history, but increasingly to become arbitrary, mere grotesques. Here the external world is merely temporal.
- Cases in Dickens, Balzac etc – we can see a sort of de-totalized totality. With Balzac novel of abstract idealism has exhausted as a form.
- Novel of romantic disillusionment. Here the external world achieves temporal qualities. Flaubert’s ‘Education Sentimentale’. Here again novel achieves a sense of unity.
- Goethe’s Wilhem Meister and in novels of Tolstoy – A third category of Synthesis type.
- Marx dissolved Hegelian series of ideal forms into empirical reality of History.
- Trajectory from metaphysics to history in Lukacs.
- It is history rather than nature which constitutes the privileged object of human knowledge.
- Class consciousness is not so much an empirical and psychological phenomenon, or those collective manifestations explored by sociology.
