Sunday Read: Nicholas Dames Considers the Use of Theory as Content in Fiction
Nicholas Dames has written an article for n+1 Magazine on what he calls “The theory generation”.
Dames looks at the use of theory in novels such as Teju Cole’s Open City, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs. Dames is not interested in the post-modern concept of theory as something that fundamentally changes the form of the novel, but rather in the way that current authors are using theory as an “uneasy part of fiction’s content”:
If you studied the liberal arts in an American college anytime after 1980, you were likely exposed to what is universally called Theory. Perhaps you still possess some recognizable talismans: that copy of The Foucault Reader, with the master’s bald head and piercing eyes emblematic of pure intellection; A Thousand Plateaus with its Escher-lite line-drawing promising the thrills of disorientation; the stark, sickly-gray spine of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics; a stack of little Semiotext(e) volumes bought over time from the now-defunct video rental place. Maybe they still carry a faint whiff of rebellion or awakening, or (at least) late-adolescent disaffection. Maybe they evoke shame (for having lost touch with them, or having never really read them); maybe they evoke disdain (for their preciousness, or their inability to solve tedious adult dilemmas); maybe they’re mute. But chances are that, of those studies, they are what remain. And you can walk into the homes of friends and experience the recognition, wanly amusing or embarrassing, of finding the very same books.
Book details
- Open City by Teju Cole
EAN: 9780571279432
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- The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
EAN: 9780007441297
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- A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
EAN: 9780375409288
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Apr
