Novel Times, or, the Imitation of Life

Abstract

The time and the timeliness of the festschrift are peculiar. By its nature, the festschrift is historical, celebration that is also an occasion to reflect on tradition and to propose certain historicization. Even when the essays offered in homage to the honored scholar are not directly biographical, as is the case in this special issue of Novel, they are invariably composed in what we might call biographical or autobiographical mood. To borrow Robert Scholes's description of the monstrous personal chronicles that are the subject of his essay in this volume, the genre of the festschrift is never properly biographical, being written too directly in response to the event, the celebrated career, that motivates it and well before conclusion is available that would turn it into a history or story with definitive ending (Scholes 414). But the object of marking the movement of time, both in the course of career and in the field it traverses, remains central. And so, the contributors to this festschrift for Mark Spilka, Editor of Novel and Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University, were asked to engage in their essays with the development of studies in the novel over the last twenty-five years, to situate their arguments more or less explicitly in relation to this still indefinite history, even as they set out to stake new claims and propose new objects of inquiry. Yet, from this perspective, the festschrift is also topical genre, text situated very much in the present festive moment and in real sense looking to the future, as the presence of those new objects I mention above clearly attests. Indeed, the very gestures by which the essays here collected mark the continuities and discontinuities between their present arguments and their past assumptions signal their focus on the past in the present, on the history of the present, rather than on the past for its own sake, for memorialization alone. And so the festschrift is in fact very current, very contemporary, genre that must orchestrate its memories and its reflection of the past in relation to timely report on the current state of affairs.