Abstract

The dissertation, a study of four novels--Don Quixote, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, and The Trial--inserts a particular historical reading of literary texts into a philosophically mediated reflection about the genre of the novel. The study first analyzes the individual texts in order to determine the assumptions about discourse each of them makes. These modalities of discourse are then set against the background of post-Romantic reflection about the genre formulated by five twentieth-century theoreticians of the novel: Friedrich Schlegel, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rene Girard, and Maurice Blanchot. The theoretical part places the novel in the context of speculative philosophy which is largely responsible for the first systematic discussion of the genre . By juxtaposing the concrete readings with the different typologies of the novelistic genre, the dissertation formulates the paradoxes inherent in the novelistic genre in so far as it radically questions the essentially deductive system of genre derivation inherited from antiquity. ;All the above authors, with the exception of Blanchot, explain the genesis and morphology of the novel in fundamentally dialectical terms . The dissertation proposes that the four novels radicalize the speculative scheme of the genre's genesis by affiliating it with the aesthetics of the Kantian sublime, in which synthesis stalls before the antinomies of the transcendental imagination. The novel, rather than reaching its apogee, as Hegel would have it, in the "objective humor" of the Romantic age, annihilates itself, criticizes itself in the infinite spiral of Romantic irony. Consequently, as a genre, the novel cannot be recuperated in a new epos ; rather, it only approximates its generic individuality postulated in the ideal concept of literature. On the level of technique, the four novels reflect themselves in other literary works and, through that reflection, demonstrate their merely historical, transitory mode of incorporating the modern, post-romantic notion of generic individuality