Against death: the American novel after the end of the author

Posthumous novels ask us to re-imagine both authors and novels. In this re-imagination, we not only arrive at a new understanding of the author’s and novel’s conception, but we also infer from the posthumous novel’s entire situation a new understanding of the individual’s conception in culture. The situation of the posthumous novel creates a serendipitous literary-critical perspective from which we can consider the author’s birth and death alongside the birth and death of the novel itself. The dialectic of self-fashioning and being-fashioned plays out at once in the posthumous novel’s form and content, suggesting in its resolution the distributive and mutually constitutive nature of individual and authorial selfhood. Against Death bundles critical practices from Literary Studies, Buddhism, and Marxism to investigate the circumstances of three posthumous novels—The Buccaneers (1938; 1993; 1993) by Edith Wharton, Juneteenth (1999) by Ralph Ellison, and The Pale King (2011) by David Foster Wallace—and to elaborate in the process new conceptual models of authorship and individuality. Against Death asks us to recognize an individual author’s creative prowess not as singularly immanent, but as the distillate of a collaborative confluence—a celebration of the field as it inheres in the individual. That the individual author’s name in fact signals the collaborative intention of a system of individuals suggests also a politics that at once preserves and transcends the narrative of the individual in relation to the community.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Delaware

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Nash, Joseph B.

• Authorship
• Buddhism
• Marxism
• Novels
• Posthumous

DOI

https://doi.org/10.58088/dptj-5989

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:udspace.udel.edu:19716/32710