Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel Creature, Affect, Form

While rumors of the imminent death of the novel are everywhere, this book shows how some of our most significant twenty-first century writers mobilize the idea of the end of the novel to reimagine the ethics and politics of literature. Writers like J.M. Coetzee, Teju Cole, and Tom McCarthy disturb the emotional scenarios through which the novel form traditionally operates in order to figure unregimented forms of life and affect. Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel combines intense discussions of key contemporary works and of theories of the novel with original interventions in current critical and theoretical debates—about affect, the anthropocene, biopolitics, cosmopolitanism, and about the forms and functions of fiction after 9/11 and after postmodernism.

Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor of American literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Romanticism after the Holocaust and the co-editor of, most recently, Institutions of World Literature.

Introduction:After-Affects
1.Persistent Affect (Tom McCarthy, David Shields, Lars Iyer)
2.Abandoned Creatures (J.M. Coetzee)
3.Cosmopolitan Dissociation (Teju Cole)
4.Epic Failures (Dana Spiotta, Hari Kunzru, Russell Banks)
Coda: The Descent of the Novel (James Meek)
Notes
Works Cited
Index