Features of the Novel

Question 1

Summarise Lukacs’ key points on the novel

(3)

Answer 1

1. ‘Novel is the epic of a world abandoned by God’
2. ‘The novel seeks, by giving form, to uncover and construct the concealed totality of life’
3. In novel characters have interior lives because of a disconnection between individual and meaning in world
4. The novel’s hero ‘is the product of estrangement from the outside world’ ‘when interiority and adventure are forever divorced from one another

Question 2

Summarise Bakhtin’s key points on the novel

(5)

Answer 2

1. The novel still evolving as a genre (why exciting)
2. The novel should not be poetic
3. ‘Hero not “heroic” - more well-rounded, containing both positive and negative characteristics
4. Allow for character development
5. ‘Novel should become for the contemporary world what the epic was for the ancient world’ - not reclaiming past, but be for current times
6. Evolving flexibility in itself reflects modern times
7. ‘Its stylistic three-dimensionality, which is linked with the multi-layered consciousness realised int the novel’
8. Polyglossial (national languages aware of and illuminating each other)
9. We don’t know the end of a novel
10. Parodies other genres
11. Based on personal experience - ‘to portray an event on the same time-and-value plane as ourselves and one’s contemporaries’
12. ‘In a patriarchal social structure the ruling class does, in a certain sense, belong to the world of “fathers” and is thus separated from other classes by a distance that is almost epic’
13. The future either ‘an essentially indifferent continuation of hte present, or as an end, a final destruction, a catastrophe’

Question 3

Summarise Ian Watt’s key points on the novel

(1)

Answer 3

1. Novels not really manifestations of epics at all!