Novel Plasticity: Aesthetics, Politics, and Formal Arrangements in the Nineteenth-Century British and French Novel.

摘要

My dissertation advances a new theory of the 'formal plasticity' of the novel and contributes to a resurgence of interest in and vibrant redefinition of formalism in literary and cultural studies. Since the rise of modern novel theory, studies of novel form have emphasized wholeness, totality, and the synthesizing power of the ending. Where novel theory has traditionally held that form achieves its final iteration alongside narrative closure, I contend that the ending is only one in a series of arrangements of the multiple forms of the novel. Novel Plasticity theorizes novel form not as singular, static and whole, but as a dynamic, multiple, process. Like Dickens's Mr. Venus who articulates miscellaneous bones into fully articulated skeletons that fetch a pretty price on the West End, I too understand novel form as a continual process of re-articulation or rearrangement.;Drawing from Jacques Ranciere's theorization of the partage du sensible (the distribution of the sensible), and in line with recent work in New Formalism, I define form as the structures and patterns that organize not only aesthetic but also social and political phenomena. To wit, the chapters of my dissertation analyze literary forms, like description, character, and trope, as well as social and political forms, like the family, the museum, or the sewer. By attending to the many arrangements the novel plays out for us, unrestricted by narrative space, structural position, or narrative progress, formal plasticity avoids evaluating the success or failure of these arrangements only by the novel's ending, which simplifies and reduces the complex formal work of the novelistic middle. The close readings of novels by Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Henry James, Emile Zola, and Victor Hugo at once demonstrate the prevalence of formal plasticity across national traditions as they highlight the novel's potential to offer new or previously unrecognized arrangements of social, political, and aesthetic forms. Thus, I argue that the novel matters, not simply as a reflection of social realities, but as an active and influential agent in shaping and rearranging the forms that order aesthetic and social experience.