Editor's Introduction: The Way We Read Now

Abstract

To commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Novel, members of the editorial board organized a conference sponsored by Brown University and held on November 9-10,2007. conference was designed to bring scholars of the novel from various areas within the literary disciplines into conversation around theoretical issues common to novel studies rather than to any particular national literature or liter ary specialization. We called our conference Theories of the Novel Now. If the novel in English does in fact suppress alternative narratives within the cultures that it permeates, as well as poetry and drama and the worlds they might conjure for us, then its dominance is not reflected in the institutions of literary studies. There is not a division of the Modern Language Association, a learned society, or a major scholarly journal (save ours and perhaps one other) devoted exclusively to the study of the novel across national languages and historical peri ods. To countermand the practice of reading novels in terms of problems specific to a national language, historical period, or social scientific approach?specific to anything, it would seem, except to the novel itself?the Novel editorial board invited a number of scholars who work in various areas of novel studies to orga nize panels on topics that would promote discussion of current theorizations of the novel. These panels turned out to be provocatively inconsistent in their levels of abstraction (e.g., George Luk?cs; The Novel and Mass Culture; Outside, After, and Against Liberalism; Roberto Bolano or the Commodification of Exile) and were, as a single enterprise, sometimes in conflict with one another. These connec tions and disjunctions generated pretty heady conversation. Energized by the dialogue, any number of participants urged us to capture the moment in print. On discovering that the journal could not afford to put out a sin gle issue, or even a double issue, that ran hundreds of pages past the usual length, we took a page from nineteenth-century publishers who had to feed a popular appetite for very long novels and decided on a triple-decker: three separate issues of Novel (42.2, 42.3, and 43.1) to appear in relatively rapid succession under the