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Thursday, April 15, 2021 Faculty sponsors: Nancy Armstrong, Roberto Dainotto, Anne Garréta If the global circulation of novels has increased in numbers, reach, and importance during the period from 1990 to 2020, we figured, then it stands to reason that critical work on this body of fiction should increase in these respects as well. With this as an article of faith, three members of the Duke faculty developed and co-taught a sequence of five graduate courses focused on various aspects of what, for lack of a better term, we are calling “the global novel.” The most recent of these courses aimed at increasing the scholarly range and professional versatility of graduate students in the literary fields by training them to think, research, and write collaboratively. ....
The Global Novel: Mediations Hours: M 5:05-7:45 Nancy Armstrong, Roberto Dainotto Louis Althusser is known to have said that “ideology represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence.” Assuming that statement is a pretty good fit for traditional literary realism as well, we feel it is time to rephrase this principle for the global novel which would go something like this: “the global novel represents individuals’ imaginary relation to forms of mediation.” Rather than refer to life beyond the page as one organized around the home, the workplace, the school, the legal system and so forth, the novels we have in mind aspire to live not only outside the language in which they were written but also beyond the printed page in film, television series, comic books, audiobooks, electronic games, and so forth. In that a good number of these novels quite literally attempt to escape the material confines of the medium, they require ....
The Novel Project In fall of 2016, eleven Duke faculty all of whom were working on their own within their respective language departments discovered that they shared a common object of knowledge and stood to benefit immensely from working as a group. The group included Nancy Armstrong (English), Miriam Cooke (Arabic), Roberto Dainotto (Italian), Anne Garréta (French), Shai Ginsburg (Hebrew), Aimee Kwon (Korean, Japanese), Cate Reilly (Russian), Anne-Gaëlle Saliot (French), Aarthi Vadde (English), and Leonard Tennenhouse (English, American). (Bill Donahue from German is now at Notre Dame.) Convinced this group provided the right intellectual environment for challenging such Eurocentric notions as “the world republic of letters” or “world literature” and their area-studies counterparts, we applied for a multi-year collaborative grant to fund a project to discover what, if any formal features identified those novels likely to thrive in the new global market regardles ....