Inventing the Novel

Abstract

Abstract Bakhtin as a philosopher and a student of the novel is intent upon the novel’s role in the history of consciousness. His project fails if he is wrong about the dialogic nature of consciousness or the cultural centrality of the novel as the only discourse that can model human consciousness and its intersubjective character. Inventing the Novel is an argument in four stages: the Introduction surveys Bakhtin’s life and his theoretical work in the 1920s, which grounded his work on the novel, as investigated in following chapters. Chapter 1 sketches Bakhtin’s view of literary history as an agonistic dialogue of genres, concluding with his claim that the novel originates as a new way of evaluating time. Chapter 2 explores Bakhtin’s theory of chronotopes: how do forms of time and space in ancient fiction delimit the possible representation of the human? Chapter 3 assesses Bakhtin’s poetics of genre in his account of Menippean satire as crucial in the history of the novel. Chapter 4 uses Petronius to address the prosaics of the novel, exploring Bakhtin’s account of how novelists of “the second stylistic line” orchestrate the babble of voices expressive of an era into “a microcosm of heteroglossia,” focusing it through the consciousness of characters “on the boundary” between I and thou. Insofar as this analysis succeeds, it evinces the truth of Bakhtin’s claim that the role of Petronius’s Satyrica in the history of the novel is “immense.”