In an essay from his book The Flesh of Words, Jacques Rancière refers to “the suspensive existence of literature.” This seminar will be devoted to an in-depth consideration of the possible meanings of this phrase. At issue for us will be the suspension of the normative assumption that the fundamental difference between a person (the author, the reader) and a fictional character is that the former has being while the latter does not. The syllabus will feature a sub-genre of the novel that disturbs this normative assumption by explicitly staging the collapse of the divide between actual and fictional being, flesh and word, author and character, through an extended representation of the porosity of those categories on every level of the text—structural, characterological, and narratological. The result is the development of a metafictional discourse within the fiction itself that narrates a crossing-over of the author’s material actuality with the immateriality of character. We’ll examine the forms of crossing-over, its particular temporal and spatial conditions, and its ethical consequences and philosophical implications both within and outside the novel.
We will read Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child; Kenzaburo Oe, The Changeling; Philip Roth, Operation Shylock; J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book 1; and Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory, possibly supplemented by his 2014 film, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq. Theorists may include Paul Ricoeur, M. M. Bakhtin, Jacques Rancière, J. M. Coetzee, Roland Barthes, Charles Taylor, Emile Benveniste, and Daniel Kahneman.
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