Genre without genre

Romanticism, the novel and the new

David Cunningham

Form, as it is mastered, becomes attenuated; it nonetheless, often presented as interchangeable: Art,

becomes dissociated from any liturgy, rule, yard- Literature, Poetry and the Novel.
stick; the epic is discarded in favour of the novel, From this perspective, while it has not been
verse in favour of prose; there is no longer any
entirely unusual in recent philosophical approaches
orthodoxy, and form is as free as the will of its
creator. to speak of the early romantic philosophy of ‘art’4 as
Gustave Flaubert1 in some way anticipating, or precipitating, if not the
modern(ist) idea of art in general (as Jay Bernstein
‘Just as our literature began with the novel,’ writes suggests),5 then at least its current so-called ‘post-
Friedrich Schlegel in his ‘Letter about the Novel’, ‘so medium’ or ‘post-conceptual’ condition,6 one should
the Greek began with the epic and dissolved in it.’2 also note that a theory of art, strictly speaking, is
Written as part of his Dialogue on Poetry (Gespräch rarely broached in such terms within the writings of
über die Poesie) published in 1800, as an account of the Jena Romantics themselves. Instead, to the degree
the actual novels of the late eighteenth century, that such a theory appears, it does so most often in
Schlegel’s ‘Letter’ is notoriously problematic. Yet, if the guise of a philosophy of literature, poetry or the
nothing else, the importance of the ‘Letter about the novel.7 Indeed, it is this that defines the opening
Novel’ is that it establishes a philosophical frame for problem of Benjamin’s 1919 dissertation ‘The Concept
what will, for much theory and criticism in its wake, of Art Criticism [Kunstkritik] in German Romanti-
be thought to most crucially define and delimit the cism’, in which he notes the fundamental ‘equivoca-
novel as an art: that it is the distinctively modern tion’ in Schlegel ‘when he speaks of art’, in so far as
literary form, the ‘beginning’, as Schlegel puts it, of it was the ‘basic laws’ of ‘poetry or literature’ that
our literature.3 ‘counted for him, in all probability, as the basic laws
In what follows I approach this conception of the of all art’. As a result, ‘both concepts’ – that is, ‘art’, on
novel in relation to this dossier’s concern with the the one hand, and ‘literature’ (Poesie) or ‘poetry’, on
transdisciplinary legacies of early German Romanti- the other – Benjamin concludes, ‘are only unclearly
cism, with particular reference to the construction distinguished from each other’.8 What Philippe
of the concepts of ‘art’ and ‘the new’. My basic claim Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy observe of
will be that it is precisely as a model of both such August Schlegel’s Lectures on Art and Literature,
concepts – of ‘art’, on the one hand, and of the ‘new’ written in 1801–02 – that they could be understood
as a condition of art’s modernity, on the other – that as both ‘Lectures on literature considered as … a
the significance of the early German Romantic phil- specific art’ and, at the same time, as ‘Lectures on art
osophy of the novel exceeds its specific containment considered as literature, [or as] Lectures on literature
within the disciplinary structure of literary studies. considered as the essence of art’ – thus takes on a
At the same time, however, this transdisciplinary rather wider significance.9
significance bequeaths certain difficulties – difficul- In part, this can be seen to reflect the legacy of a
ties that arise, most directly, because of a problem far broader privileging of poetry that, while casting
concerning how we are to think the relationship a glance back to the philosophy of Plato or Aristotle,
between what are four different conceptual forms was specific to the eighteenth-century formation of
of generality (or four different ‘ideas’) at work in the the modern system of the arts. Such is exemplified
writings of the Jena Romantics themselves, which are, in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia where the

14 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 9 6 (m a r /a p r 2 0 1 6 )
five fine arts of ‘imagination’ are ultimately reunified A romantic book
as forms of poetry (Poesie).10 Equally, it can be related At least one reason for the relative indifference of
to the Romantics’ overall tendency metaphysically ‘Letter about the Novel’ to the actual corpus of
to generalize an idea of Poesie as extending beyond the eighteenth-century European novel is obvious
either literature or art altogether, in order to name enough: the text begins with the condemnation of
what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy call the ontological its addressee Amalia’s taste for what it calls ‘those
‘truth of production in itself’, part of what they term dirty volumes’ full of ‘confused and crude phrases’,
the Romantics’ ‘hyperbolization’ of poetry per se in which ‘serve no purpose but to kill time and to
the wake of Kant’s third critique.11 However, I want spoil your imagination’: ‘stacks of books from the
to focus less on this hyperbolization – though its loan library’, written by ‘people with whom, face to
transdisciplinary implications will not be unrelated face, you would be ashamed to exchange even a few
to at least one aspect of my discussion – and more words’.15 Placed alongside, for example, Athenaeum
on the specific role played by the (theory of the) fragment 421, with its contempt for the ‘educated
novel within this reinscription of a privileging of the businessman’ who, while reading, ‘sheds quantities of
poetic in early Romanticism, so as to consider what noble tears’, it would certainly not be hard to locate
starting from this particular vantage point might tell in this an early and entirely typical anxiety about the
us about its various legacies. To the extent that the emergence of mass culture, as well as – à la Auerbach
novel played for the Jena Romantics ‘the role of the or Rancière – of its consequent, ‘democratic’ dis­
canonical paradigm of Poetry par excellence’, it did so, ordering of given class and gender roles.16 Indeed,
as Rakefet Sheffy notes, precisely ‘not as a specific lit- there can be little doubt that it is precisely against a
erary model but rather as a general idea, an organizing (so to speak) ‘prosaic’ reality of the novel’s emergence
principle’.12 What, then, does it mean to consider the that Schlegel’s famous definition of the novel as a
novel not only as the quintessentially modern literary ‘romantic book’ is constructed, while tacitly acknowl-
genre – ‘the sole genre that continues to develop’, as edging its technological conditions in that which is
Bakhtin will later put it, ‘that is as yet uncompleted’13 meant ‘for reading’.17 Most importantly, it is Schlegel’s
– but as constituting the basis for the modern ‘idea’ of distancing of the novel as a romantic book from such
literature or poetry, and, through this, finally, of the ‘dirty volumes’ – which are, long before Benjamin’s
‘general idea’ of modern art tout court? age of technological reproducibility, ‘modern-style,
Such a postulation is not without its dilemmas. mass-produced industrial commodities in a rather
As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy observe, in one sense special sense’18 – that is certainly a crucial condition
the ‘Letter about the Novel’ can be read merely as of the novel’s ultimate subsumption by an absolute
‘content[ing] itself with transposing to the novel what idea of ‘poetry’ in the Romantics’ writings; an idea in
Athenaeum fragment 116 [already] says of poetry’ – the face of which the actual novels produced by the
that is, an idea of romantic poetry as ‘a progressive, likes of Fielding or Richardson, Jean Paul or Diderot,
universal poetry’, which would ‘mix and fuse poetry cannot but be found wanting.
and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art There is, of course, a familiar story to be told
and the poetry of nature’, and, in so doing, should – at this point concerning the modern ‘autonomiza-
as opposed to all ‘[o]ther kids of poetry [which] are tion’ of art or literature, as well as of the role played
finished and now capable of being fully analyzed’ – by Schlegel, Novalis and others within this ‘highly
‘forever be becoming and never be perfected’. Indeed, contradictory process’.19 Yet, at the same time, if
from this perspective, Schlegel’s famous definition of Schlegel’s conception of the novel is, in some sense,
the novel as ‘a romantic book’ clearly ‘advances us no intrinsically ‘hypothetical’, underpinned by a ‘system-
farther than fragment 116’s “all poetry is romantic”’.14 atic avoidance of formal definition’, as Sheffy notes,
Yet, like all translations, this is not without remain- then its status as a ‘general idea’ rather than a ‘specific
der; nor is the shift from fragment 116 to Schlegel’s literary model’ has, in part, an evident philosophical
‘Letter’ a simple repetition without difference in this justification that is specific to Schlegel’s writings,
respect. Most specifically, it raises the question: what and that exceeds any straightforward reading of it
does it mean for an account of ‘our literature’ – and, as nothing more than an ‘elitist’ retreat into a ‘sec-
by extension, ‘our art’ – not only that it should find tarian aestheticism’ of the type that Sheffy himself
its idea or model in the novel, but that the novel itself observes in the Dialogue on Poetry.20 For as an ‘idea’
should be regarded, when all is said and done, as a of art – indeed, an ideal form – any individual novel
form of, or even another name for, poetry? would appear, by definition, to be found incapable of

15
satisfying ‘the requirement of the task’ that Schlegel existing novel itself (even if, here, poetry is not of
assigns to it.21 Indeed, it is precisely this that suggests course limited to verse). ‘This marvellous prose is
it as a ‘model’ for an idea of ‘art’ as such, in so far prose, and yet it is poetry’, writes Schlegel in his 1798
as while each true work of art must in some way essay on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – a description that
embody, in its very individuality, what it is to be a should be read alongside the assertion in the ‘Letter’
(modern) work of art, as a determinate, individual that poetry ‘is so deeply rooted in man that at times,
work it is always inadequate to this idea.22 even under the most unfavourable circumstances, it
Still, even allowing for such a philosophical justifi- grows without cultivation’. ‘So in our unfantastic age’,
cation, Schlegel’s comments on the actual eighteenth- Schlegel continues, ‘in the actual estate of prose … we
century novel – which cannot, he writes, be ‘anything will find a few individuals who, sensing in themselves
else but sickly’ – appear to go considerably beyond a certain originality of the imagination, express it,
this. For, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy note, from even though they are still far removed from true
the very moment that the novel is conceived, philo- art.’24 In this sense, what Benjamin declares to be the
sophically, as ‘always more than a novel’, the actual ground on which rests ‘the entire philosophy of art of
‘novel itself, in the restricted sense’, becomes for early Romanticism’ – ‘The idea of poetry is prose’ – is
Schlegel not only ‘inadequate’ to its idea – at best, considerably more complex than he would seem to
a ‘tentative outline of what ultimately ought to be allow, not least because this ‘idea’ is just as plausibly
realised’ – but actually ‘execrable’. In the words of inverted: that is, in so far as the novel is, or might be,
Idea 11, ‘instead of an eternally rich, infinite poetry’, ‘true art’, it is not so much that the ‘idea of poetry is
we have ‘only novels’.23 How, then, is the ‘execrable’ prose’ as it is that the idea of (artistic) prose is poetry.25
character of these novels that are ‘only novels’ to be Before coming to this, however, one would have to
understood? ask: what is it, then, about this new category of the
The first dimension to the inadequacy of the novel novel that, even in its apparently radical abstraction
‘in the restricted sense’ relates to the ambiguous from any actual ‘execrable’ literary works of Schlegel’s
relation established by Schlegel between a certain, time, allows, nonetheless, for its deployment as ‘a
specifically modern ‘generalized notion of poetry’ for general idea, an organizing principle’ appropriate to
which the idea of the novel might be the ‘keystone’ ‘our age’? The answer to this second question lies,
and what would appear, at the same time, to be the I think, most obviously in what is taken to be the
seemingly irreducible prosaic character of the actually novel’s problematic relation to genre. ‘All the classical

16
poetical genres’, states Critical Fragment number 60, other ‘literary’ forms, which are thought (however
‘have now become ridiculous in their rigid purity’. mythically) to descend directly from the hierarchical
And it is the modernity of this ‘now’ – ‘have now categorizations of ancient ‘literature’. It is via this
become ridiculous’ – that precisely defines the exem- ‘emancipation’ that the novel can be conceived as,
plary modernity of the novel in the ‘Letter’: namely, in Ian Watt’s words, ‘the logical literary vehicle of
as a genre that is, in some way, paradoxically without a culture which … has [itself] set an unprecedented
genre. ‘I detest the novel as far as it wants to be a value on originality, on the novel.’28
separate genre’, Schlegel writes. ‘I can scarcely visual-
ize a novel but as a mixture of storytelling, song and Freedom and individuality
other forms.’ Anticipating what both Lukács and As a separation of the novel from the ancient – the
Bakhtin will therefore, over a century later, take to basis of ‘our’ literature as opposed to theirs – this
be most broadly definitive of the novel as a form – its evidently builds upon Schlegel’s earlier 1795 On the
essential heterogeneity or hybridity – as that which is Study of Greek Poetry, and, in particular, its account of
always a ‘mixture’, the novel is here, as an idea, inher- modern poetry as that which has as its ‘goal’ an indi-
ently anti-generic: a mongrel ‘form’ that can have viduality ‘that is original and interesting’. In this way,
only a ‘negative’ identity, made up, in its particularity, the idea of the novel inherits – or, rather, becomes
of a ‘mixture’ of fragments and combinations of other the specifically modern manifestation of – the earlier
forms.26 text’s definition of poetry as what it calls the ‘uni-
If, in this sense, the novel as a general idea can versal’ art because it ‘is already incomparably more
come to stand in for an idea of art in general – and, closely related to freedom, and more independent
more specifically, the basis of our art – it is, first, from external influence’. As the most free from ‘exter-
because its freedom from ‘genre’ (or from any given nal influence’, or unconditioned, the novel would
‘idea’) is intrinsic to what it is to be modern itself. then be, logically, the most universal form of poetry
Indeed, it is the specifically modern character of per se.29 It is this profoundly historical relation to
the novel, partially embodied in its association with ‘freedom’ that is consequently the basis for Schlegel’s
prose, which means that it is not covered by those reading of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, written a couple
rules that delimit the ‘classical’ genres of epic, lyric, of years before the ‘Letter about the Novel’, as a book
tragedy and comedy, and so has, by definition, a which is to be valued because it is ‘absolutely new and
self-defining freedom from such conventions. (It is unique’. In Schlegel’s famous words:
such ‘freedom’ that provides the non-philosophical
condition for what Benjamin understands as the We can only learn to understand it on its own
terms. To judge it according to an idea of genre
Romantics’ philosophical transferral of the structure
drawn from custom and belief, accidental experi-
of Fichte’s self-determining, autopoietic, absolutized ences and arbitrary demands, is as if a child tried
subject to the structure of the modern artwork as a to clutch the stars and the moon in his hand and
form of infinite reflection.) Hence, the importance pack them in his satchel.30
of its simultaneous equivalence to and difference
from the epic in Schlegel’s ‘Letter’: not via its iden- As Bernstein summarizes, effectively, at this point,
tification with the epic, as a means of reinserting transposing the Romantic philosophy of the novel
the novel within an already existing organization of into that of a philosophy of ‘modernist’ art tout court:
‘institutionalized’ genre or type, and so effectively as an idea in German Romanticism, ‘[t]he novel as
reducing its novelty (in the sense in which Morhof, “new and unique” is constitutive of what it is to
for example, describes it as an ‘unversed Epic’, or be a novel; it must exceed genre requirements – as
Fielding, in the preface to Joseph Andrews, speaks of emblems of traditional authority – as a condition
a ‘comic epic in prose’27) but as that which functions of it being an artwork.’31 Certainly it is at this point
as a form analogous to it (in its ‘image of the age’, that the Romantic philosophy of the novel can most
as Athenaeum fragment 116 has it). The novel is for obviously seem to anticipate the ‘modernism’ of, say,
the modern what the epic was for the ancient – Viktor Shklovsky’s claim concerning Sterne’s Tristram
the beginning of ‘our’ literature, just as ‘the Greek Shandy, that it ‘is the most typical novel in world
began with the epic and dissolved in it’ – but only literature’, precisely because of its ‘atypicality’, its
precisely as modern: that is, it is modern by virtue of ‘absolute’ uniqueness and newness. Although where
its very discontinuity from the kind of generic rules Shklovsky generalizes this, through the concept of
or standards, including those of epic, requisite for ostranenie, to a recurrent, if dynamic, transhistorical

17
‘poetic’ feature of all ‘literature’, Schlegel already narrative form and content – an individualism which
insists upon in its fundamental ‘modernity’ (as finds one early canonical embodiment in the appar-
divided from the ancient) in a far more emphatic ently ‘self-governing subject’ that is Daniel Defoe’s
sense.32 Robinson Crusoe (‘Fichte’s I – is a Robinson’ writes
As a ‘genre without genre’, this means that the Novalis famously).34 While the epic is, according to
modernity of the novel is constituted, as Lukács will such a story, generated from a social world whose
later rephrase the point, through its (formal) freedom ‘homogeneity’ allows for no ‘separation between “I”
to create itself in the absence of any given end. It and “you”’, the novel has its birthplace, as the likes
is this that is the direct flipside of what the latter of Benjamin, Adorno and Watt concur, in ‘the indi-
notoriously terms, in The Theory of the Novel, its vidual in his isolation’: ‘To write a novel is to take
‘transcendental homelessness’. In the novel, Lukács that which is incommensurable in the representation
writes, we have ‘discovered the productivity of the of human existence to the extreme.’ What Benjamin
spirit’, whereby, if human reality can no longer be terms Gide’s doctrine of a roman pur is, from this
taken to have an inherent meaning or necessity – a perspective, a form of ‘pure interiority’, and, as such,
given social ‘content’ that is historically carried by a ‘the extreme opposite of the purely epic approach’.
theory of genres (and their hierarchization) – then the (‘Nothing is more contrary to the epic style’, notes
meanings and logical patterns imposed upon such a Schlegel in the ‘Letter’, ‘than when the influence of
reality by ‘art’ must necessarily be self-generated by the subjective mood becomes in the least visible.’)
each work itself. To the extent that this is why, as Or, to put it another way, ‘alienation itself’ becomes,
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy point out, for Schlegel as Adorno suggests, ‘an aesthetic device for the
‘the novel, as opposed to the epic, is the “genre” novel’.35
of subjective freedom itself’, so ‘demonstrat[ing], Yet, since it requires that its status as ‘art’ or ‘lit-
in a perfectly coherent manner, that it is equal to erature’ can itself be grounded only in its ‘newness’,
romanticism’, it is also precisely this ‘freedom’ that or its freedom from generic conventions, the novel’s
makes it so usable – in a pragmatic sense – as a ‘individualism’ – which has, in literary studies, gener-
trans- or anti-generic ‘idea’ of such unconditioned ally been located principally in the ways in which
freedom or self-determination in general. Indeed, at its protagonists ‘are set apart from the world’, by
its most extreme, this can be ‘theorized’ apparently contrast to the ‘epic heroes [who] belong entirely to
quite separately from any actually existing novels their cities’36 – also takes on a larger, more ‘abstract’
themselves. significance in so far as it articulates a broader sense
However, this ‘breach’ between the novel as of the historical present as an ongoing dissolution of
‘idea’ and the ‘prosaic’ reality of actual eighteenth- tradition at the level of artistic form (that is to say, as
century novels, leaves a number of problems, already Watt observes, of an apparent ‘formlessness’).37 ‘Cur-
apparent in Schlegel’s writings. The first of these rently’, Adorno writes in the late 1960s, ‘art stirs most
is that the philosophical attempt to make sense of energetically where it decomposes its subordinating
the novel anticipates (or, indeed, functions as the concept. In this decomposition, art is true to itself:
model for) that problematic situation of modern art it breaks the mimetic taboo on the impure and the
which Adorno will much later refer to as an ‘advance hybrid.’ But, significantly, this ‘break’ is already inher-
of nominalism’ or the emergence of a principium ent to the discourse of the novel in this sense, long
individuationis across not only literature but all the before the contemporary trans- or inter-medial forms
arts: that is, a situation in which ‘the universal is no of which Adorno is thinking, as Schegel’s writings in
longer granted to art through types’, and in which, particular show. Indeed, if the novel as a ‘romantic
instead, individual artworks (such as Wilhelm Meister book’ is, in principle, the beginning of ‘our literature’,
or Tristram Shandy) – which, Adorno writes, ‘formerly and, hence, of ‘our art’ more generally, it is so pre-
held the status of exempla’ for philosophy – demand cisely because, as an idea, the novel can already only
to be judged on their own terms, as individual.33 ever be temporarily unified retrospectively, as what
In the standard history of the novel, it is this art ‘has become’. It is understood, by virtue of its lack
principium individuationis that is said immanently to of routine conventions, ‘only by its laws of movement,
conjoin the novel to social and cultural modernity not according to any invariants. It is defined by its
by virtue of its familiar connection to the modern relation to what it is not’.38
(bourgeois) individual subject at the level of both However, precisely because of this, the individual-
its production and its consumption, as well as of its ity of the novel, as an always paradoxical exemplum

18
of a ‘genre without genre’, is that which also harbours artworks are oriented, it at the same time obscures
a necessary and peculiarly ‘modern’ danger for the the boundary against unformed, raw empiria and
Romantics. For, as that which cannot be judged thus threatens the structuration of works no less
than it sets it in motion. Prototypical of this is the
‘according to any invariants’, the problem resides
rise of the novel in the bourgeois age, the rise of
in the fact that ‘the radically particular work’, the the nominalistic and thus paradoxical form par
‘absolutely new and unique’ – in which terms Schlegel excellence.40
depicts Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – cannot but be con-
tinually haunted by the possibility that it will collapse Rendered as a ‘general idea’ of the work, the
into a mere ‘contingency and absolute indifference’ essentially ‘anti-generic’ character of the novel as
in artistic terms, since it lacks any given or a priori a paradoxical ‘genre’ inscribes, then, a ‘progressive
generic or disciplinary criteria of judgement from impossibility’ in more general terms, whereby the
which some stable ‘collective’ poetic meaning can ‘directive’ of the ‘new’ that drives the work towards
apparently be derived. Far from being, therefore, a an increasing individuality – essential to its claims
merely ‘philosophical’ issue concerning the objectiv- to freedom – must continually negotiate the impos-
ity of ‘universals’, the increasing significance accorded sibility (or illegibility) of any pure individuation. At
to the individuality of works of art registers a certain the same time, it is most obviously its prosaic ‘nature’,
socio-historical claim concerning the ways in which as this is understood by Schlegel (or, more emphati-
the social contradictions of individualism as a hege- cally, by Hegel), that ‘threatens the structuration of
monic form of the social in capitalist modernity works’ by obscuring their very ‘poetic’ separation
return to the artwork, not only as a central aspect of from ‘unformed, raw empiria’. ‘Unchecked aesthetic
the novel’s ‘subject matter’, but as a problem of form.39 nominalism … terminates in a literal facticity.’41
What Watt describes as the ‘widely agreed’ ‘criti- And if one recognizes in this, as Adorno no doubt
cal difficulties’ posed by the novel’s emphasis on meant us to, a certain dynamic of ‘anti-art’, of the
‘individuality’ is, from this perspective, generalized readymade, found object and montage, as well as of
by Adorno to become the ‘sole path of success that a certain ‘realism’ – the ‘reality hunger’ instantiated
remains open to artworks [which] is also that of their in ‘a deliberate unartiness: “raw” material, seemingly
progressive impossibility’: unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofes-
sional’, as David Shields puts it42 – it also touches
The principium individuationis in art, its imma- upon what might well be regarded as a crucial dimen-
nent nominalism, is not a given but a directive.
sion of the Romantics’ appropriation of the novel
This directive not only encourages particulariza-
tion and thus the radical elaboration of individual as, in Benjamin’s terms, the model for an idea of
works. Bringing together the universals by which (modern) ‘art’ as such.

19
Poetry of the novel, prose of the world produced by the process of ‘infinite becoming’ itself:
My claim is, then, that it is this problem of the its ‘real essence: that it should forever be becoming
paradoxical form of ‘individualism’, and thus of the and never be perfected’. ‘It alone is infinite, just as it
danger of art’s self-dissolution into ‘contingency’ and alone is free.’46
‘literal facticity’, that is first played out in a tension If as Benjamin says, then, citing Athenaeum frag-
internal to Jena Romanticism concerning what we ment 252, a ‘“philosophy of the novel … would be
are to understand by the novel as a ‘genre without the keystone” of a philosophy of poetry in general’
genre’. Indeed, this is, in large part, what constitutes in Romanticism, it would be so in the form of a
its ‘transdisciplinary’ legacy. However, it is also there- conception of art as ‘the continuum of forms’, of
fore important that to be ‘without genre’ can be read, which ‘the novel … is the comprehensible manifesta-
albeit rather crudely, in two different ways. tion’.47 Benjamin further cites here from a 1798 letter
First, it can be understood as a unification of from Novalis to August Schlegel: ‘If poetry wishes to
genres; speculatively at least. That is to say, as that extend itself, it can do so only by limiting itself … It
which does not itself constitute a genre, the novel will acquire a prosaic look.’ But, Novalis continues, ‘it
can become for the Romantics, ideally, the non-genre remains poetry and hence faithful to the essential laws
that gathers all genres within itself. (‘It is probably in of its nature … Only the mixture of its elements is
allusion to the unifying function of prose’, Benjamin without rule; the order of these, their relation to the
suggests, ‘that Novalis says: “Shouldn’t the novel whole, is still the same.’48 While the idea of the novel
comprehend all genres of style in a sequence dif- might, therefore, certainly be one name given to what
ferentially bound by a common spirit?”’43) In this case, Benjamin calls this ‘comprehensible manifestation’,
a ‘genre without genre’ would point towards a kind of by virtue of its ‘unlimitedness’ and ‘mixture of its ele-
meta- or absolute genre (whether this is called art or ments’, Schlegel’s own rejection in the ‘Letter’ of any
literature); what in the famous Athenaeum fragment actual ‘so-called novel’ as anything like an adequate
116 is defined as a ‘progressive, universal poetry’. To individual manifestation of this points to a second
the degree that this then ‘embraces everything that troubling possibility: that of a ‘without genre’ under-
is purely poetic’, it alone, Schlegel continues, ‘can stood not as that which ‘remains poetry’, as Novalis
become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole circum- suggests, but as a dissolution that opens up onto
ambient world, an image of the age’. the very dissolution of poetic unification per se – an
This does not mean that the novel returns to unendingly particular ‘mixture of elements without
the epic, however, but, to reiterate the formulations rule’ which, while having to go via prose, precisely
of the ‘Letter about the Novel’, that, just as ‘the does not become (or ‘remain’) poetry again.
Greek began with the epic and dissolved in it’, so, for It is important in this respect that the centrality
Schlegel, ‘our literature began with the novel’, pre- of the ‘prosaic’ to the Romantic conception of the
cisely because it ‘embraces everything’.44 Consequently, poetic, as Benjamin divines, is itself immediately
this ‘totalizing’ embrace is understood by Schlegel to related to the former’s freedom from genre, in so far
operate in a radically different fashion in the novel as, by contrast to poetry as verse, it is subject only to
than it does in the ‘pre-modern’ epic. ‘The epic work’, a ‘minimal formal determination’. ‘The idea of poetry
Hegel famously wrote, echoing Vico, ‘is the Saga, has found its individuality (that for which Schlegel
the Book, the Bible of a people, and every great and was seeking) in the form of prose’, writes Benjamin.
important people has such absolutely earliest books However, this emphasis on ‘the individualizing mode
which express for it its own original spirit’.45 Hence, of prose’, which is the basis for Benjamin’s reading
precisely as pre-literary in this sense, the epic is less of the essential ‘sobriety’ of the Romantic Absolute,
a genre among others than it is the expression of a also notoriously relies, as Winfried Menninghaus has
certain social form of life – a ‘people’ – and the poetry exhaustively shown, upon Benjamin’s own elision of
of a common world. (It is in this sense, too, that the differences between the prose of the novel and,
Novalis suggests Greek ‘genius’ must ‘be regarded in as it were, the prosaic per se. (‘Romantic prose is
the mass’: ‘A cultured Greek was only indirectly and not purely “prosaic”’, as Menninghaus baldly puts it.)
only in very small part his own creator.’) However, if, While for Benjamin himself this relates to a desire
on this account, the ‘totality’ of the pre-modern epic to connect the novel to a more general ‘prosaic
may be embodied in an individual work (the Book), spirit’, in the sense of the ornamented, ordinary
in Schlegel it is, instead, projected not onto any direct and sober, which would underpin his account of the
modern equivalent but rather onto that ‘everything’ Romantic Absolute as that which has ‘forfeited its

20
transcendence’, it also opens up a question of the is the universal art of the mind [or of Spirit] which
implicitly troubling relationship established in the has become free in its own nature, and which is
‘Letter About the Novel’, between the modernity of not tied to its final realisation in external sensu-
ous matter, but expatiates exclusively in the inner
the prose of the novel – which might be the ‘keystone’
space and inner time of the ideas and feelings. Yet
for a philosophical idea of poetry – and of what is it is also at this highest stage of art that art ends
called, by Schlegel, ‘the actual estate of prose’.49 by transcending itself, in as much as it abandons
In Hegel’s Aesthetics, it is this relationship between the medium of a harmonious embodiment of mind
novelistic prose and ‘the actual estate of prose’ that in sensuous form, and passes from the poetry of
constitutes a central part of his response to the imagination into the prose of thought.52
Romantic determination of the novel. Here, however, Among other things, one might say that it is here
it will not be as the idea of an infinite poetry, which that the problem of art’s relation to the ‘aesthetic’
‘can become, like the epic, a mirror of the whole is played out, in the question of its relation to an
circumambient world, an image of the age’, that the embodiment in ‘sensuous form’ – a problem which
novel will be understood as the beginning of ‘our lit- might no doubt be related to the difficulties posed
erature’, but, rather, as the foundation of the bourgeois by the linguistic work in general – something already
epic. Hegel’s reasoning is worth citing at length: broached in Schiller’s 1793 ‘Kallias or Concerning
But it is quite different with the novel, the modern Beauty’, for which, by contrast to the plastic arts,
bourgeois epic. Here we have completely before us the fact that the ‘poet’s medium is words’ entails that
again the wealth and many-sidedness of interests, poetry take a ‘long detour through the abstract realm
situations, characters, relations involved in life, the of concepts in which it loses much of its vividness
wide background of a whole world, as well as the
(sensuous power)’.53 But it is also noticeable that it
epic portrayal of events. But what is missing is the
primitive poetic general situation out of which the is re-posed by the novel in a particularly acute way
epic proper proceeds. A novel in the modern sense that the Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics do not
of the word presupposes a world already prosaically themselves register.
ordered; then, on this ground and within its own First, because of its pivotal role within the produc-
sphere … it regains for poetry the right it had lost, tion of a new concept of literature, as opposed to
so far as this is possible in view of that presupposi-
poetry in its given sense, it is this connection of the
tion. Consequently one of the commonest, and,
for the novel, most appropriate, collisions is the novel to both the prose of thought and the prose of
conflict between the poetry of the heart and the the world, on Hegel’s account, that will in the twen-
opposing prose of circumstances and the accidents tieth century result in a widening distance between
of external situations. … So far as presentation the discipline of literary studies and (philosophical)
goes, the novel proper, like the epic, requires the ‘aesthetics’. Second, it raises a question concerning
entirety of an outlook on the world and life, the
the artistic status of ‘prose’, precisely to the degree
manifold materials and contents of which come
into appearance within the individual event that is that novelistic prose is apparently always shading into
the centre of the whole. But in the more detailed that which is proper not to ‘art’, but rather to either
treatment and execution here all the more scope ‘thought’ or ‘real life’. (If the latter is most obviously
may be given to the poet the less he can avoid figured in a certain issue of ‘realism’, and an indis-
bringing into his descriptions the prose of real life, cernibility of ‘literary’ language from everyday dis-
though without for that reason remaining himself
course, its shading into thought encapsulates an idea
on the ground of the prosaic and commonplace.50
of the novel as itself already, in the words of Robbe-
If, in this way, Hegel submits the division of ancient Grillet, a ‘becoming-world of philosophy’.54) As such,
and modern to what Franco Moretti calls a more the contemporaneity of the ‘aesthetic regime’ and
‘merciless historicization’, this also, and most fun- the ‘literary regime’ – which Rancière, for example,
damentally, locates such a division not only in the renders effectively interchangeable in his recent work
difference between the epic and the novel, but in the – harbours a rather more profound and dissonant
very distance that it identifies between the ‘worlds’ of complexity. For in so far as literature explains ‘art’ in
the poetic and the prosaic themselves.51 general, as Benjamin suggests of Schlegel, it is also
In fact, although Moretti doesn’t mention it, this never quite contained by ‘art’, it would seem; and not
is a somewhat different version of the so-called ‘end only in an aesthetic sense. Or, to put it another way,
of art’ thesis: that ‘art, considered in its highest voca- it is regarding the question of how to think the novel
tion, is and remains for us a thing of the past’. Poetry, as art, historically, that the irreducibility of ‘art’ to
Hegel famously argues, ‘aesthetics’ is most powerfully posed.55

21
 Of course, the assertion that the
novel is the modern (bourgeois) epic
– whose material is, above all, prose
– contains an inherent (and for Hegel
self-conscious) paradox. The ‘primi-
tive [or originary] poetic situation out
of which the epic proper proceeds’
designates, Hegel insists, a life which
is displaced by one which has as its
condition the separation of the indi-
vidual from a progressively objecti-
fied, supra­ individual, and abstract
world:

[T]he individual as he appears in

this world of prose and everyday
is … intelligible not from himself,
but from something else. For the
individual man stands in de-
pendence on external influences,
laws, political institutions, civil
relationships, which he just finds
confronting him, and he must
bow to them whether he has them
as his own inner being or not. …
by its urtext Don Quixote, it cannot but also register
[T]he greatness of the whole event and the total
aim … appears only as a mass of individual details; the novel’s essential relationship to the (‘non-art’)
occupations and activities are sundered and split character of the ‘opposing prose of circumstances’,
into infinitely many parts, so that to individuals as Hegel calls it, constitutive of social modernity’s
only a particle of the whole may accrue.56 world – and not only as a bourgeois world, but, finally,
as a world governed by capital itself. The Hegelian
While the epic is thus the poetry of an already
prose of the world becomes here, specifically, the
poetic world, the novel is, on Hegel’s account, tasked
‘domination of capitalist prose over the inner poetry
by Romanticism with (impossibly) re-poeticizing
of human experience’.57 Indeed, it is on this basis
modern life – to ‘regain for poetry the right it had
that Lukács can make his claim that the apparently
lost’. Yet it must, in fact, always register the unavoid-
all-too-concrete prose of naturalism masks, in its
ability of ‘bringing into [its] descriptions the prose of
focus on Hegel’s ‘mass of individual details’, what
real life, though without for that reason remaining
is in fact a more fundamental abstraction in which
… on the ground of the prosaic and commonplace’.
it is subsumed by neither poetry nor philosophy but
It would not be hard to show that, under rather
by the ‘reality’ of the Hegelian ‘bad infinite’ that is
different historical circumstances, it is this dialec-
embodied in the endless accumulation of prose in
tic that determines, at every point, Lukács’s later
work and world alike. By reducing ‘detail to the level
accounts of the novel. And it is telling that at least
of mere particularity’, both modernism and natural-
one legacy of this Romantic theorization of the novel
ism, Lukács avers, replace ‘concrete typicality with
is the ways in which someone like Lukács himself
abstract particularity’, in which ‘[e]very person, every
will thereby come to associate what he calls realism
object, every relationship can stand for something
proper (by distinction to ‘naturalism’) not, as one
else’.58
might expect, with prose but explicitly with poetry, in
In the earlier Theory of the Novel, Lukács described
his writings of the 1930s. One does not have to follow
the novel’s principium individuationis, which breaks
the dubious conclusions Lukács draws from this – let
‘the circle whose closed nature was the transcen-
alone the critical judgements upon naturalism or
dental essence’ of the Greeks’ world, as follows:
modernism that they entail – to note the very real
dilemmas concerning the novel’s status as ‘art’ that We have invented the productivity of the spirit:
they thereby inscribe. For if prose or the prosaic is the that is why the primaeval images have irrevocably
condition of the novel’s modernity as art, exemplified lost their objective self-evidence for us, and our

22
 thinking follows the endless path of an approxima- equivalence and exchangeability. The (endless) ‘unifi-
tion that is never accomplished. We have invented cation’ of all relations under capital is what continu-
the creation of forms: and that is why everything ally ‘unworks’ the speculative unification of poetry
that falls from our weary and despairing hands
in the ‘idea of prose’, which the artwork as ‘infinite
must always be incomplete.59
becoming’ seeks to inscribe, against the actual prose
This ‘endless path of an approximation’ contains a of the world.
clear echo of the basis that Schlegel and Novalis This throws a rather different light on Watt’s
give for the privileging of the artwork as the means observation that among the most obvious results
to a presentation of the unpresentable Absolute. of ‘the application of primarily economic criteria
However, this is not only rendered here in a pro- to the production of literature was to favour prose
foundly melancholic form by Lukács – in a way as against verse’, whereby ‘bringing it under the
that effectively reapplies Hegel’s judgement on art control of the law of the market-place … assisted the
to the ‘historico-philosophical reality’ of a ‘bour- development of one of the characteristic technical
geois’ modernity per se – but is transformed into a innovations of the form – its copious particularity of
movement of the ‘unendingly particular’ (to borrow description and explanation’.62 In his early Soul and
another of Hegel’s own definitions of the prose of Form, Lukács suggests, in exemplary fashion, that
the world) that involves a very different conception the novels of Lawrence Sterne ‘are formless because
of prose’s ‘unfettered plasticity’. Most crucially here, they could have carried on to infinity’. Yet this prosaic
prose’s lack of any ‘natural’ or intrinsic limit on what logic of ‘potentially infinite addition’, as Moretti
the novel might depict or incorporate mirrors, from terms it in The Modern Epic, where ‘there exists no
the perspective of a later Marxian reworking of the “organic” fetters to hold it in check’, and which is (as
Hegelian prose of the world as the ‘unendingly par- he writes of Ulysses) ‘capable of connecting everything
ticular’, a parallel lack with regard to what can be with everything else’, is not only that of ‘mechanical
exchanged specifically in the universalization of the form’, but is itself reflective, formally, of a certain
form of exchange value. It is no surprise, then, that internalization of the logic of ‘the market-place’ in
Lukács should consequently seek to resurrect genre what we might term the prosaic equivalences of the
against the threat of nominalist dissolution posed by real abstraction of the commodity form itself.63 To the
prose’s ‘unendingness’: extent that naturalism, as Lukács declares, ‘deprives
life of its poetry, reduces all to prose’, this is thus far
The theory of genres provides the sphere of objec- from unique to Zola and his contemporaries, but
tivity and objective criteria for individual works reflects a tension between the poetic and the prosaic
and for the individual creative process of each
that is immanent to the ‘realism’ of the novel as the
writer. … Ideological capitulation to capitalist phil-
istinism is reflected in nihilism regarding genres.60 ‘epic form’ of a capitalist world per se.64

Understood in this fashion, the very anti-generic Literary transdisciplinarity

character of the novel as ‘prose’ – and, hence, what Let me come back finally, then, to my central issue.
Lukács will term that ‘form-problem’ generated by It is not a facile question of asserting the primacy of
the lack of any intrinsic limit on what the work might the prosaic over the poetic, or vice versa, in historical
incorporate (or its ‘plasticity’ and ‘freedom’) – also understandings of the novel as the modern ‘genre
marks its troubling relation to that indifference with without genre’. Rather, it is a question of pointing
regard to what can be concretely exchanged via the out the ways in which it is precisely the ‘collision’
equalizing force of money’s abstract regime of gener- between the two, as Hegel terms it, that is played out,
alized equivalence, or to ‘the domination of capitalist again and again, in the history of attempts to grasp it
prose’.61 (It is this that the later Lukács’s redefinition as an idea. Still, if these two tendencies have always
of novelistic realism as a form of epic poetry in Scott, been in play, it is the novel’s prosaicness which has,
Balzac or Tolstoy will seek to overcome.) The anxiety, historically, presented a specific problem for its theo-
in other words, is not so much one concerning a rization; not least within the terms of philosophical
dynamic of dissolution or ‘unworking’ of unity per se aesthetics. For if it is the anti-generic character of the
as it is one about the possibility that such ‘unification’ novel as a genre which marks it out as the exemplary
might finally be that constituted by capital’s own form of the modern artwork – the basis for what
‘objective’ production of a new prose of the world, Bakhtin describes as an increasing ‘novelization’ of
through the formation of an increasingly universal all art forms within capitalist modernity65 – it also

23
renders the ‘integrity’ of the novel itself, as a form, word’.68 In other words, the concept of literature – to
necessarily problematic, and thus threatens its very the extent that is constructed through the sublation
reunification as ‘art’; that is, on Schlegel’s terms, as of any existing arrangement of genres – is already
poetic. As such, to the degree that it is a condition of that of a kind of ‘generic art’ in De Duve’s sense.
modern art’s remaining both ‘modern’ and ‘art’ – in a Jena Romanticism’s attempts to think together art,
strong sense – that it continually derives its newness poetry, the novel and ‘literature’ (Poesie) as interlock-
and critical meaning from its immanent engagement ing forms of generality must then be understood to
with and incorporation of the ‘opposing prose of reflect such a historical shift at one of its earliest,
circumstances’ – from, that is, what is not art – it pivotal moments. Yet while it is partly through such
is indeed, in this very specific sense, an encapsula- thought that the modern discipline of literature will
tion and extension of what can be understood as a emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
generalized ‘novelization’ of art’s ‘concept’. the writings of Schlegel and Novalis simultaneously
In this sense, while it is true that Adorno’s negative both prefiguratively exceed these subsequent discipli-
dialectics entails that any ‘generic identification’ of nary limits by locating in literature the model for a
poetry or literature (as Poesie) ‘with art as such’ is transdisciplinary idea of art in general (as Benjamin
‘strictly excluded, or at least subject to criticism’,66 recognized) and yet, in subsuming such an idea under
this criticism is itself at least partly derived from a generalized poetry, ultimately seek to expunge from
the immanent critique of ‘generalized poetry’, which it the specifically ‘worldly’ prosaicness of the actually
emerges through the theory (and practice) of the novel existing novel. Bernstein suggests that in offering a
since Romanticism. There is, as such, more than a ‘prescient account of modernism’, Schlegel’s essay
simple analogy at stake in the historical relationship on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister ‘unnervingly anticipates
between the philosophy of the novel and someone some of the burdens the novel would be required to
like Thierry de Duve’s account of the more recent undertake’, but also ‘overburdens the novel, pushing
emergence of a ‘generic art’ through the recovery of it in a direction where it ceases to be a work of art’;
the Duchampian readymade in minimalism and early ceases, that is, to ‘remain poetry’.69 Yet, from the
conceptualism, and its determinate negation of the above perspective, it is precisely this ‘directive’, as
medium-based Greenbergian dialectic of modernism. Adorno calls it, that explains why the relationship
For while de Duve’s suggestion that such a generic art between the modern concepts of ‘art’ and ‘literature’
emerges, specifically, through an ‘art that has severed should have been marked by such persistent tension.
its ties with the specific crafts and traditions of either It is the generic character of the idea of literature
painting or sculpture’ may convince as a genealogy of (Poesie) in Romanticism that models the idea of art,
post-1960s art after painterly abstraction, and of what yet the dual relations of literature to the novel, on
Osborne terms its ‘postconceptual condition’, it has the one hand, and poetry in its narrower modern
to be understood, if it is not to be reduced to some sense, on the other, give it a specificity that belies the
purely ‘internal’ logic of the visual arts alone, as one actualization of this generic character as such. This
trajectory within a far broader problematic intrinsic doubtless explains, too, why the trans- or counter-
to the modern ‘idea’ of art in general.67 disciplinary dynamics immanent to the modern idea
Historically, the modern concept of literature of literature have themselves often provoked a search
emerged in large part through the strain placed upon for an essence of ‘literariness’ through which the
an earlier idea of poetry by the newness of the novel, borders of the new (academic) discipline of literature
and by the contradictory social forms of capitalism could be secured in the face of the collapse of the
and bourgeois individualism that it registers, as that existing idea of poetry. Roman Jakobson’s famous
which is at once both work of art and commodity. complaint of the early 1920s is emblematic:
As Raymond Williams notes in Keywords, if the ‘spe-
cialization’ of literature ‘towards imaginative writing, The object of a science of literature is not litera-
within the basic assumptions of Romanticism’, ture, but literariness – that is, that which makes a
entailed its taking the place of poetry as the ‘word given work a work of literature. Until now literary
[that] did service for this before the specialization’, historians have preferred to act like the policeman
who, intending to arrest a certain person, would,
it is ‘probable’ that the broadly contemporaneous
at any opportunity, seize any and all persons
‘specialization of poetry to verse, together with the who chanced into the apartment, as well as those
increasing importance of prose forms such as the who passed along the street. The literary histori-
novel, made literature the most available general ans used everything – anthropology, psychology,

24
 politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of litera- 4. That is, ‘art in the singular’ in that sense which ‘has only
ture, they created a conglomeration of homespun existed for two centuries’ – i.e. since romanticism itself –
and which ‘meant the upheaval of the coordinates through
disciplines.70
which the “fine arts” had been located up to then’. Jacques
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill,
However, Jakobson’s need to locate ‘that which Continuum, London and New York, 2004, p. 52.
makes a given work [of art] a work of literature’ 5. See J.M. Bernstein, ‘Introduction’, in Bernstein, ed., Classi-
cal and Romantic German Aesthetics, pp. xxx–xxxi.
in language’s poetic ‘function’, and hence in a form 6. See Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not At All: Philosophy of
directed against its contamination by either the prose Contemporary Art, Verso, London and New York, 2013, pp.
of thought or the world, means that the attempt 37–69. For Osborne, contemporary art as postconceptual
art ‘actualizes the idea of the work of art to be found in
to identify the ‘specific difference’ of literariness the Jena Romantic philosophy of art, under new historical
was effectively doomed to failure from the outset, conditions’ (p. 10).
7. It is also to be found no doubt, in a different if connected
since the very concept of literature (as distinct from way, in a theory of the fragment, although I leave this aside
‘poetry’) is constituted, historically, precisely through here. For some thoughts on the romantic fragment with
such contamination. This is not simply a question regard to theories of the avant-garde specifically, see David
Cunningham, ‘The Futures of Surrealism: Hegelianism,
of a heterogeneity of approaches to the literary Romanticism and the Avant-Garde’, SubStance, vol. 34, no.
work, spanning anthropology, psychology, and so 2, 2005, pp. 47–65. The seminal account of the fragment
as the romantic ‘genre’ par excellence is to be found in
on, as Jakobson bemoans, but is internal to the ‘nov- Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary
elization’ of literature per se, since it is through the Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism,
impossibility of separating a purely ‘literary’ language trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, SUNY Press,
Albany NY, 1988; heavily indebted to Maurice Blanchot,
from other discourses that a transdisciplinary idea ‘The Athenaeum’, in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan
of literature is itself constructed as, in the words Hanson, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993,
pp. 351–9.
of Stefan Jonsson (writing of Musil), a ‘discourse 8. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism in German
of discourses that could contain all other linguistic Romanticism’, trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland
registers and rhetorical codes: scientific, colloquial, and Ian Balfour, in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926,
ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard
narrative, religious, political, poetic, social, visionary, University Press, Cambridge MA, 1996, p. 118. This English
sexual, legal and more’.71 If the ‘name “literature”’ translation even omits the word ‘art’ from the title, translat-
ing Kunstkritik simply as ‘Criticism’.
designates in this way what Derrida identifies as ‘a 9. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, pp.
certain promise of “being able to say everything”’, it is 82–3.
the historically open form that this ‘everything’ takes, 10. See Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History,
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001, pp. 83–5; and
and the ‘paradoxical form’ that the literary work must on the concept of ‘literature’, by contrast, pp. 192–3.
thereby assume (as that which can never be ‘literary’ 11. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 12.
12. It is this that made the novel ‘a paradigmatic illustration
in its entirety), that has made literary studies, since of the new literary institution as prefigured mainly by the
the 1960s at least, such a lively and productive site Early Romantics at the turn of the century’. Rakefet Sheffy,
for transdisciplinary work across the humanities as ‘Strategies of Canonization: Manipulating the Idea of the
Novel and the Intellectual Field in Eighteenth-Century
a whole.72 German Culture’, paper delivered at the Dartmouth Collo-
quium, ‘The Making of Culture’, Dartmouth College, 22–27
July 1994, www.tau.ac.il/~rakefet/papers/rs-strat.htm. See
Notes also Rakefet Sheffy, ‘The Late Eighteenth-Century German
This article is an output from the AHRC-funded project “Trivialroman” as Constructed by Literary History and
‘Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities: Problems, Criticism’, Texte 12, 1992, pp. 197–217.
Methods, Histories, Concepts’ (AH/1004378/1), 2011–2013, 13. M.M. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination:
located within the Centre for Research in Modern Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University University of Texas Press, Austin TX, 1981, p. 3.
London. 14. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter
1. Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, January 16th 1852, Firchow, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991,
in The Selected Letters of Gustave Flaubert, trans. Francis pp. 31–2; Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute,
Steegmuller, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, New York, 1953, p. 97.
p. 128. 15. Schlegel, ‘Letter about the Novel’, pp. 288, 290.
2. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Letter about the Novel’, trans. Ernst 16. Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 85. This
Behler and Roman Struc, in J.M. Bernstein, ed., Classical would, of course, also concur with the argument made by
and Romantic German Aesthetics, Cambridge University Larry Shiner and others that a key factor in the ‘invention’
Press, Cambridge, 2003, p. 293 (emphasis added). The full of the modern idea of ‘art’ itself – coincident with the
English translation, from which this extract is taken, can be emergence of the modern conception of ‘literature’ – was
found in Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry and Literary ‘the replacement of patronage by an art market and a
Aphorisms, Penn State University Press, University Park PA, middle-class public’. As Shiner continues, one exemplary
1967. issue at stake in the eighteenth-century Quarrel of the
3. Cf. David Cunningham, ‘Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Ancients and Moderns was ‘the question of whether the
Totality and the Theory of the Novel’, Radical Philosophy emerging art public rather than the scholarly elite were
163, September/October 2010, pp. 11–23. to be judges of literature and, more specifically, whether

25
 a new (female-identified) genre, such as the novel, was with his claim (in 1798) that, just as, ’wrongly’, the novel has
to be accepted as a successor of epic poetry’. See Shiner, been ‘regarded as prose’, so the ‘highest, truest prose is the
The Invention of Art, pp. 7, 79. Famously, this is one of the lyric poem [lyrische Gedicht]’. Cited in Lilian R. Furst, ed.
central concerns of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and European Romanticism: Self-Definition, Methuen, London,
its detailed analysis of a new ‘reading public’ emergent in 1980, pp. 134, 138.
the eighteenth century. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, 26. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 8 (emphasis added);
Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972. As Watt notes, the ‘Letter about the Novel’, p. 293. For Lukács, the ‘homeless-
relationship between the novel and the epic was consist- ness’ of the novel is partly reflected in the ways in which,
ently framed through this historical division, as exemplified within it, ‘genres now cut across one another, with a
by Voltaire’s 1727 Essay of Epic Poetry that contrasts the complexity that cannot be disentangled’. The Theory of the
‘most learned’ readers of the Iliad with ‘that Eagerness and Novel, p. 41.
Rapture, which a woman feels when she reads the novel of 27. Georg Morhof, Unterricht Von Der Deutchen Sprache und
Zaida’ (cited in Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 280). Poesie (1682): ‘It is another type of narrative / yet in prose /
17. Schlegel, ‘Letter about the Novel’, p. 293. which however is entitled with full justification to be called
18. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, London (heroic) Epic. For it is not different from the other types
and New York, 1984, p. 38. As John Brenkman puts it: / except only in metrics / yet it was granted by Aristotle /
‘The novel is commodity form and artistic form wrapped that there may also be a poem without versification
in one, the first type of artwork in which the object the (metrics). These are the so-called novels (Romainen), about
artist creates (the novel) is indissociable from the object whose origins there is no univocal opinion.’ Cited in Sheffy,
manufactured to be sold (the book).’ John Brenkman, ‘Strategies of Canonization’.
‘Innovation: Notes on Nihilism and the Aesthetics of the 28. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, pp. 13–14.
Novel’, in Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, Volume 2: Forms 29. Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans.
and Themes, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, Stuart Barnett, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 2001, pp. 32, 42.
2006, p. 829. 30. Schlegel, ‘On Goethe’s Meister’, p. 275.
19. See, for example, Peter Bürger, ‘Literary Institution 31. Bernstein, ‘Introduction’, in Classic and Romantic German
and Modernization’, in The Decline of Modernism, trans. Aesthetics, p. xxx.
Nicholas Walker, Pennsylvania State University Press, 32. Viktor Shkolvsky, ‘Sterne’s Tristram Shandy’, in Dorothy J.
University Park PA, 1992, pp. 3–18. Hale, ed., The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory
20. Sheffy, ‘Strategies of Canonization’, citing Jochen Schulte- 1900–2000, Blackwell, Oxford, 2006, p. 52.
Sasse, ‘The Concept of Literary Criticism in German 33. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-
Romanticism 1795–1810’, in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ed., A Kentor, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997,
History of German Literary Criticism, 1730–1980, University pp. 201, 333.
of Nebraska Press, Lincoln NE, 1988. 34. Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Fiction of Bourgeois Morality and
21. Diana Behler, The Theory of the Novel in Early German the Paradox of Individualism’, in Moretti, ed., The Novel,
Romanticism, Peter Lang, Bern, 1978, p. 10. ‘Yesterday vol. 2, p. 358; Novalis, Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia:
when the argument became most heated’, the writer of Das Allgemeine Brouillon, trans. David Wood, SUNY Press,
the ‘Letter’ says to his addressee Amalia, ‘you demanded Albany, NY, 2007, p. 132 [trans. modified].
a definition of the novel; you said it as if you already knew 35. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock,
that you would not receive a satisfactory answer’. This is, Merlin, London, 1971, p. 32; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Crisis of
then, the prompt for Schlegel’s assertion that the novel is a the Novel’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Selected Writings,
‘romantic book’. Schlegel, ‘Letter about the Novel’, p. 293. Volume 2, Part 1: 1927–1930, Harvard University Press,
22. It is in this vein that Benjamin’s argument that the ‘idea of Cambridge MA, 1999, pp. 299, 300; Schlegel, ‘Letter about
poetry is prose’ is, in turn, ‘the final determination of the the Novel’, p. 294; Theodor Adorno, ‘The Narrator of the
idea of art’ requires that the ‘theory of the novel’ through Contemporary Novel’, in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans.
which it is articulated be ‘freed of an exclusively empirical Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Columbia University Press, New
reference to Wilhelm Meister’. Benjamin, ‘The Concept of York, 1991, p. 32.
Criticism’, p. 173. 36. Thomas Pavel, ‘The Novel in Search of Itself: A Historical
23. Schlegel, ‘Letter About the Novel’, p. 289; Lacoue-Labarthe Morphology’, in Moretti, ed., The Novel, vol. 2, p. 3.
and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 98; Schlegel, Philo- 37. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, pp. 14–15.
sophical Fragments, p. 95 (emphasis added). 38. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 182, 3; see also the 1967
24. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘On Goethe’s Meister’, in Bernstein, ed., essay ‘Art and the Arts’, trans. Rodney Livingstone, in Can
Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, p. 275; Schlegel, One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, Stanford
‘Letter about the Novel’, p. 289. If the actual novel is University Press, Stanford CA, 2003, pp. 368–87. On the
‘sickly’, it is, then, because ‘what has grown in such a sickly relation of this to the theory of the novel, see David Cun-
environment cannot be anything else’ (ibid.). In Idea 11, ningham, ‘After Adorno: The Narrator of the Contemporary
the ‘triviality’ of actual novels is more specifically related Novel’, in David Cunningham and Nigel Mapp, eds, Adorno
by Schlegel to the modern ‘lack of religion’ (Philosophical and Literature, Continuum, London and New York, 2006,
Fragments, p. 95). While this informs Schlegel’s own later pp. 188–200.
conversion to a conservative Catholicism, and accompany- 39. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 38; Adorno, Aesthetic
ing medievalism, it should also be understood in relation to Theory, p. 202.
the argument of Bürger and others that ‘the institution of 40. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, pp. 202, 201.
art/literature in a fully developed bourgeois society may be 41. Ibid., p. 220.
considered as a functional equivalent of the institution of 42. David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Penguin,
religion’, in part through its encouragement of ‘the loss of London, 2011, p. 5.
validity of religious world-views’. Bürger, ‘Literary Institu- 43. Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism’, p. 174.
tion and Modernization’, pp. 18, 9. See also Terry Eagleton, 44. Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, pp. 31–2.
‘The Rise of English’, in Literary Theory: An Introduction, 45. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols, trans.
Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, pp. 15–46. T.M. Knox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975, vol. II, p. 1045.
25. Benjamin, ‘Concept of Criticism’, p. 173 (emphasis added). 46. Novalis, ‘On Goethe’, in Bernstein, ed., Classical and
The complexity of the relations at stake here can be Romantic German Aesthetics, p. 232; Schlegel, Philosophical
registered by comparing Novalis’s assertion of 1799–1800 Fragments, p. 32. Although see Idea 95: ‘The new, eternal
that a ‘novel must be poetry [Poesie] through and through’, gospel that Lessing prophesied will appear as a bible: but

26
 not as a single book in the usual sense. Even what we now an alternate ‘post-Romantic’ heritage of twentieth-century
call the Bible is actually a system of books’. Schlegel goes literary aesthetics. As Marc Redfield puts it: ‘Associated
on to offer the following ‘example’: ‘All the classical poems with voice, subjectivity, and intensity of expression and
of the ancients are coherent, inseparable; they form an feeling, lyric began to become, in the late eighteenth and
organic whole, they constitute, properly viewed, only a early nineteenth century, an available name for the essence
single poem, the only one in which poetry itself appears in of poetry, and ultimately, by extension, literature or literari-
perfection’. (ibid., p. 102). ness itself ’. Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case
47. Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism’, p. 173. To quote the of Deconstruction in America, Fordham University Press,
fragment more fully: ‘[A] philosophy of poetry as such … New York, 2016, p. 62.
would waver between the union and division of philosophy 56. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, p. 149.
and poetry … of poetry in general and the genres and 57. Georg Lukács, ‘Narrate or Describe?’, in The Writer and
kinds of poetry; and it would conclude with their complete Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur Kahn, Merlin, London,
union. … The keystone would be a philosophy of the novel.’ 1970, p. 127. See also Cunningham, ‘Capitalist Epics’.
Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 53. 58. Georg Lukács, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’, in The Meaning
48. Novalis, Letter to A.W. Schlegel, January 12th 1798, cited of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander,
in Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism’, p. 174 (emphasis Merlin, London, 1962, pp. 43, 42.
added). 59. Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, p. 34.
49. Benjamin, ‘The Concept of Criticism’, p. 173; Rodolphe 60. Ibid., p. 58; Georg Lukács, ‘The Writer and the Critic’, in The
Gasché, ‘The Sober Absolute: On Benjamin and the Early Writer and Critic, p. 210.
Romantics’, in Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, 61. As I have argued elsewhere, it is this that complicates
Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, Continuum, New York Rancière’s association of both the literary and aesthetic
and London, 2002, p. 66; Winfried Menninghaus,’Walter regimes with a democratic politics (or, at least, meta-
Benjamin’s Exposition of the Romantic Theory of Reflec- politics), since the forms of equivalence and indifference at
tion’, in Hanssen and Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and stake can never be clearly disentangled from those forms
Romanticism, p. 36. This early account of prose as a ‘sober- of equivalence and indifference definitive of money and
ing’ of the Absolute, in which the latter is ‘de-sacralized, the commodity form. See David Cunningham, ‘Flaubert’s
de-divinized’, as Gasché puts it, has a complex relation to Parrot’, Radical Philosophy 170, November/December 2011,
Benjamin’s somewhat enigmatic assertion that the ‘idea of pp. 46–50.
prose coincides with the messianic idea of universal history’ 62. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p. 62.
articulated in one of his very last texts, the ‘Paralipomena 63. Moretti, The Modern Epic, pp. 96, 152, 217. This is hinted at
to “On the Concept of History”’: ‘Its language is liberated earlier in the book, by way of the young Marx, in Moretti’s
prose – prose which has burst the fetters of script [Schrift]’. discussion of money in which ‘the concrete contents it
To be fully understood, this would no doubt have to be assumes remain wholly undetermined’, but the point is
related to Benjamin’s remark, in the same text, that ‘In never really developed (p. 91).
the idea of the classless society, Marx secularized the idea 64. Georg Lukács, ‘Critical Realism and Socialist Realism’, in
of messianic time.’ Significantly, as regards Marx’s own The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, p. 125.
distance from historicism, this is elaborated by Benjamin 65. Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, p. 6.
specifically in terms of the latter’s ‘liquidation of the epic 66. See Stewart Martin, ‘Literature and the Modern System of
moment’ in Capital, as opposed to ‘the idea that history the Arts: Sources of Criticism in Adorno’, in Cunningham
is something which can be narrated’. If Marx does this and Mapp, eds, Adorno and Literature, pp. 19–20.
through a ‘process of construction’ underpinned by ‘the 67. Thierry de Duve, Kant After Duchamp, MIT Press, Cam-
broad, steel framework of a theory’, he also does so, bridge MA, 1996, pp. 205, 154. For de Duve, the general
Benjamin argues, as a means of honouring ‘the memory plausibility of this argument is confirmed by the sense in
of the anonymous’ by contrast to the ‘monumental’, which the aesthetic claims of post-1960s’ painting can
heroic narratives of an (epic) historicism. Walter Benjamin, no longer be made in terms of their status as paintings,
‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’, trans. but only as art, in a way that is still not quite the case for,
Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland, in Selected Writings, say, musicians or architects. However, it is worth noting
Volume 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. that this looks rather different from the perspective of
Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2003, ‘literature’, since the latter is itself already a kind of generic
pp. 404, 401, 404, 406. category. At any rate, the equivalent to ‘painting’ here
50. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, pp. 1092–3. would not be ‘literature’ but, say, the poem in its narrower
51. Franco Moretti, The Modern Epic: The World System from sense.
Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare, Verso, 68. Raymond Williams, ‘Literature’, in Keywords: A Vocabulary
London and New York, 1996, p. 12. In this, Hegel is close of Culture and Society, Oxford University Press, New York,
to someone like Diderot, who similarly ‘thinks that great 1985, pp. 186–7.
epic and dramatic poetry can only develop in an archaic 69. Bernstein, ‘Introduction’, in Classical and Romantic German
society’. In this way, as Peter Bürger puts it, ‘Poetry (the Aesthetics, p. xxxi.
term already designates what we now call art) is brought 70. Roman Jakobson, cited in Boris Eichenbaum, ‘The Theory
into radical opposition to modernity (in the sociological of the “Formal Method”’, in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
meaning).’ Bürger, ‘Literary Institution and Modernization’, Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, University of
p. 13. Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 1965, p. 107.
52. G.W.F. Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, trans. 71. Stefan Jonsson, ‘A citizen of Kakania’, New Left Review 27,
Bernard Bosanquet, Penguin, London, 1993, p. 96 (emphasis 2004, p. 140.
added). 72. Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’,
53. Friedrich Schiller, ‘Kallias or Concerning Beauty’, in in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge, Routledge, London
Bernstein, ed., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, pp. and New York, 1992, pp. 40, 37. As Derrida reminds us here,
181–2. the ‘name “literature” is a very recent invention. The set of
54. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Why I Love Barthes, trans. Andrew laws and conventions which fixed what we call literature
Brown, Polity, Cambridge, 2011, p. 56. in modernity was not indispensable for poetic works to
55. The mirror image of this, and counter-movement to it, circulate’ (p. 40).
would perhaps be the progressive ‘lyricization’ of poetry in

27