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Faculty sponsors: Nancy Armstrong, Roberto Dainotto, Anne Garréta If the global circulation of novels has increased in numbers, reach, and importance during the period from 1990 to 2020, we figured, then it stands to reason that critical work on this body of fiction should increase in these respects as well.  With this as an article of faith, three members of the Duke faculty developed and co-taught a sequence of five graduate courses focused on various aspects of what, for lack of a better term, we are calling “the global… read more about Novel Project Graduate Seminars Reckon with the Global Novel  »

Sponsored by the Society for Novel Studies, the new podcast Novel Dialogue aims to bring literary critics and novelists together to discuss how we read, write, publish, and remember novels. Hosted by Aarthi Vadde, Associate Professor of English at Duke University, and John Plotz, Barbara Mandel Professor of the Humanities at Brandeis University, each episode brings together a new mix of novelists and critics. You can subscribe to the new podcast from the Society for Novel Studies at Apple Podcasts,  Spotify and … read more about First Season of the Novel Dialogue Podcast Drops »

Among the many forms of disappointment brought on by the pandemic, the necessity of canceling the 2020 conference of the Society for Novel Studies at Oxford last spring was hardly the most life-changing.  Nevertheless, we feel strongly that meetings where scholars from a range of universities come together over a topic dear to their intellectual work have taken on added importance to university life and thought during the year-long period of quarantine, not to mention the countless hours of intellectual work that went into… read more about Novel Announces Special Issues Inspired by Canceled SNS Conference »

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the spring 2020 Society for Novel Studies conference in Oxford, England was cancelled. The program, which put together an impressive array of papers, is available below. In homage to the work that organizers Penny Fielding, Andrew Taylor, and Lloyd Pratt put into SNS 2020, the editorial board of Novel has partnered with the Executive Board of SNS to publish a series of special issues composed of articles developed from proposals for papers accepted for presentation at the conference… read more about Society for Novel Studies 2020 Conference Canceled »

By: Caroline Levine The theme for the 2018 biennial SNS conference at Cornell was Novel Theory. We asked: what is the theory of the novel in the 21st century? how do novels theorize? The conference itself offered a number of formats—conventional panels and keynote lectures, keyword seminars with short papers and time for discussion, and seminars on non-Anglophone novels from different periods. Keywords included contemporaryBLACK, data, interiority, infrastructure, empiricism, plot, totality, memory, scale,… read more about Society for Novel Studies Cornell Conference Recap »

Novel: A Forum on Fiction is excited to announce its fall symposium will be held at Brown University November 15. The event asks "who or what counts as 'life' within the frame of the novel?" The event, which runs from 9:30 a.m. until 4:45 p.m. at the Stephen Robert '62 Campus Center, will feature three talks from Jennifer Wenzel of Columbia University, Michaela Bronstein of Stanford University, and Benjamin Morgan of the University of Chicago.  read more about Brown Fall Symposium: Novel Life-Forms »

The Novel Project at Duke is excited to host Wai Chee Dimock for a talk, "Humans in a Non-Human World: Computation, Translation, and the Three-Body Problem," Thursday, October 31. The event is co-sponsored by Novel: A Forum on Fiction and the Duke Franklin Humanities Institute. The even will begin with a reception in 314 Allen Building at 4:30, with the talk to follow from 5-7 p.m.  Wai Chee Dimock is the William Lampson Professor of American Studies at Yale and the author of Through Other Continents: American… read more about Duke Event: Wai Chee Dimock Talk  »

NOVEL is excited host to Radical Aesthetics, a symposium at Duke University featuring talks from Joshua Clover (University of California-Davis) and Anne Garland Mahler (University of Virginia). The event will take place Thursday, February 7 from 5-7 p.m. in the Franklin Humanities Institute's Ahmadieh Lecture Room. “The most perfect example of the modern State,” wrote Marx and Engels, “is North America.” Here in the US, they argued, the idea “that the State exists only for the sake of private property” had become a civil… read more about Upcoming Event: Radical Aesthetics  »

On Wednesday, November 14, Emilio Sauri will give a talk titled, "Imperial Decay: Literature after the End of Modernization in the Americas." The event will take place from 5-7 p.m. at the East Duke Pink Parlor.  Sauri is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research focuses on literature and visual art from Latin America and the United States and reads these in relation to the development of the global economy from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-… read more about Upcoming Event: Emilio Sauri Talk at Duke »

2018 NOVEL Symposium: The Return of Genre Fiction November 2, 2018 Smith Warehouse, Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall, Bay 4, C105 This forum brings together 2 scholars whose current work considers the question of why we seem to be seeing a resurgence of popular genres—e.g., science fiction, romance, historical fiction, the novel of manners, detective fiction, the city novel, the Western, and so forth-in novels now written for and marketed to a global readership… read more about 2018 NOVEL Symposium: The Return of Genre Fiction »

UPDATE: SYMPOSIUM RESCHEDULED FOR SPRING DUE TO WEATHER NOVEL is excited host to Radical Aesthetics, a symposium featuring talks from Joshua Clover (University of California-Davis) and Anne Garland Mahler (University of Virginia). “The most perfect example of the modern State,” wrote Marx and Engels, “is North America.” Here in the US, they argued, the idea “that the State exists only for the sake of private property” had become a civil religion, “penetrat[ing] the consciousness of the normal man.”  Almost 150 years later… read more about Radical Aesthetics  »

Novel Terms Symposium Recap By: Matthew Taft and Hannah Rogers Symposium In light of recent debates about the meaning and efficacy of "critique" and "suspicious reading," the graduate student planning committee desired to provoke a broader conversation about the use of critical terminology in the field of novel studies. Theories of the novel have relied on a wide variety of terms—e.g., realism, biopolitics, dialectic, network, plot, totality, scale, temporality, character, chronotope,… read more about Novel Terms Symposium Recap »

On April 20, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction hosted its 2018 spring symposium, Novel Terms, at Duke University. Featuring three speakers — Leigh Claire La Berge (BMCC CUNY), Josh Gang (UC Berkley), and Kenneth Warren (University of Chicago) — and a roundtable featuring Rita Monticelli, University of Bologna; John Marx, UC Davis; Lloyd Pratt, Oxford University; and Rey Chow, Duke — the symposium explored the terminology we use in literary criticism. In asking what type of work we accomplish with a particular type of… read more about Novel Terms Symposium Videos »

Novel Terms April 20, 2018 Duke University, Ahmadieh Family Conference Room, Bay 4 Franklin Humanities Institute (Annual Novel symposium organized by Duke graduate students in consultation with the editorial board of Novel: A Forum on Fiction) The field of literary criticism is littered with terminology. Theories of the novel have relied on a wide variety of terms —e.g., realism, biopolitics, dialectic, network, plot, totality, scale, temporality, character… read more about Spring 2018 Symposium at Duke: Novel Terms »

On November 3, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction hosted its 2017 fall symposium, The Novel & The Concrete, at Brown University. Featuring three speakers — Audrey Wasser, David Alworth, and Emilio Sauri — and a roundtable of four members of the Brown faculty (Tim Bewes, Ben Parker, Thangam Ravindranathan, and Melissa Clayton), the symposium explored the relationship between the novel, concreteness, and abstraction. In asking what we can gain from specifically considering the novel form alongside the concrete, this… read more about The Novel & The Concrete Symposium Videos »

The Society for Novel Studies will hold its biennial conference from May 31-June 2, 2018 at Cornell University. “Novel Theory” prompts participants to ask "what is the theory of the novel in the twenty-first century?" and "how do novels theorize?" The deadline to submit a paper proposal is December 1.   Learn more by exploring the official conference website, following us on Twitter @novelforum, or liking us on Facebook. read more about Society for Novel Studies 2018 Conference: Novel Theory »

The Novel & The Concrete: A Symposium By: Edwige Crucifix and Emily Simon The Symposium Ian Watt argued in The Rise of the Novel that the modern English novel departs from previous prose literature through its intimate relationship with the “concrete,” taking as its object non-allegorical individuals, vernacular speech, ordinary experience, and the particulars of daily life. At the same time, the history of the novel suggests that it is a global form, uniquely capable of… read more about The Novel & The Concrete Symposium Recap »

NOVEL is excited to announce that Mark McGurl from Standford University will be giving a talk titled "Being and Time-Management: Fictions of Consumer Consciousness in the Long Age of Amazon" on October 12 from 5-7 p.m. in 314 Allen Building. McGurl is the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing.  The event is sponsored by Novel: A Forum on Fiction and The Novel Project at Duke. read more about Upcoming Event: Mark McGurl Visits Duke University »

Novel Disconnections Symposium By: Russell Coldicutt, Kevin Gallin, and Hannah Rogers The Symposium When planning this symposium, the graduate student committee sought to bring invited speakers and roundtable participants from other universities to Duke to consider how the novel imagines “disconnections.” Through this forum, our goal was ask what questions such as: Does the novel acknowledge contemporary migration and refugee crises?  How, and in what ways do contemporary novels alter a… read more about Novel Disconnections Recap »

Novel Disconnections Symposium April 14, 2017 Ahmadieh Family Lecture Hall Does the novel acknowledge contemporary migration and refugee crises?  How, and in what ways do contemporary novels alter a narrative form arguably responsible for maintaining national differences? Given the novel’s traditional association with the rise of the modern nation-state and, more recently, with globalism in its various iterations, can… read more about Spring 2017 Symposium at Duke: Novel Disconnections »

“Action Without Nature: Rossetti and Hopkins” Nathan Hensley, Georgetown University Sponsored by Duke University's English Department, Novel, CISSCT Thursday March 23, 2017 Allen 314 4PM Reception to follow Nathan Hensley (Duke PhD 2009) is currently Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University and the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford 2016).  He is also co-editor with Philip Steer (Duke PhD 2009) of Ecological… read more about Upcoming Event: Nathan Hensley Talk at Duke University »

On March 9, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., in Duke University's FHI Garage, The Novel Project at Duke presents: A symposium: Globalizing the Novel Featuring, Jeanne-Marie Jackson (Johns Hopkins): The Global Novel of Non-Ideas: The African Death of Philosophical Suicide." Anna Bernard (Kings College London): 'Hebrew, Arabic, and Death': Palestine/Israel and the Global Novel Mariano Siskind (Harvard): "Post-global and after-cosmopolitan: contemporary literary dislocations of the non-world" Preliminary schedule:… read more about A Symposium: Globalizing the Novel »

Jane Elliott Lecture and Graduate Student Seminar Recap By: Kevin Gallin  Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and the Novel Project at Duke, along with the Duke English Department enthusiastically welcomed back Jane Elliott, senior lecturer of post-’45 Literary and Cultural Studies at King’s College in London, to give a talk and lead a graduate student seminar consecutively on October 27 and 28. Recently, Elliott has investigated the evolution and recombination of politics, aesthetics, and theory… read more about Jane Elliott Visit to Duke Recap »

NOVEL is excited to announce that Jane Elliott from King's College London will be visiting Duke University October 27-28. Elliott will give a talk titled "Sovereign Capture" on October 27 from 5-7 p.m. in 314 Allen Building. Elliott will also participate in a seminar with graduate students on noon the 28th.  Elliott is a senior lecturer of post-'45 Literary and Cultural Studies at King's College London. Elliott's current research concerns the combined aesthetic, political, and theoretical developments to emerge… read more about Upcoming Event: Jane Elliott Visits Duke University »

On Thursday, September 15, Duke University Middle East Studies Center, the Novel Project, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Program in Literature will sponsor a talk by Aamir Mufti titled “Strangers in Europa: Migrants, Terrorists, Refugees.” The event will take place in the Thomas Room of Lilly Library on East Campus and begins at 6 p.m. The talk is free and open to the public. Aamir Mufti, Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA, is the author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the… read more about Upcoming Event: Aamir Mufti Talk at Duke University »

By: Nick Huber Tom McCarthy delivered a keynote speech entitled “Vanity’s Residue” to the 2016 Society for Novel Studies Biennial Conference held in Pittsburgh, PA on May 13th and 14th. As the author of four novels including Remainder (2005) and Satin Island (2015), a work of criticism revolving around Herge’s Tintin comics (Tintin and the Secret of Literature), and dozens of essays on contemporary aesthetic problems, McCarthy offered a welcome repositioning of the conference’s viewpoint… read more about Society for Novel Studies Tom McCarthy Keynote Recap »