Audience-Oriented Art: The Novel in the Age of Theory

This dissertation argues that shifting attitudes about the reader among novelists and literary theorists in the late-sixties and seventies played a crucial role in reconfiguring our understanding of the novel as art. It is well established that many important novelists of the period were interested in what Frank Kermode called “the reader’s share” of meaning and it is perhaps even better known that literary theorists — from Roland Barthes to Stanley Fish — intensified that interest, turning the reader into not just a consumer, but a producer of meaning. Beginning with this shared concern, I demonstrate that while many novelists — for example, Thomas Pynchon and Italo Calvino — were enthusiastically embracing readers, some others — Joan Didion, John Hawkes, James Baldwin, William Gass, and Christine Brooke-Rose — were pursuing new strategies for asserting the text’s independence from them. As Gass, following Gertrude Stein, puts it: thinking about the reader, or “ways of reading,” is an obstacle to “advancing an art — the art.” In reexamining the reader’s status in both literary theory and the novel, I show how a very old question — “What is the novel’s relation to the world?” — was turned into a distinctively new one: “What sort of object is the novel?” Competing answers to this question, I argue, ultimately ascribe different roles to the to the reader. We can see this difference in critics (between, say, Paul de Man’s account of the work in “Form and Intent” and Michael Fried’s in “Art and Objecthood”) and perhaps even more vividly in novelists (for example, those I discuss here). One of the advantages of focusing on this two-step procedure rather than on, say, intertextuality or the postmodern waning of affect, is the revelation that the demands of theory and the demands of literature are not as neatly aligned as many accounts — like those by Brian McHale or Fredric Jameson — have claimed. Thus resituating the work of a heterogeneous group of novelists and theorists, my research draws a comparative line between art and the novel of the period, insisting on a shared concern over the character of the work of art — concerns that have only deepened (aesthetically and politically) since the late-sixties.