Table Of ContentThe End of Literature,
Hegel, and the
Contemporary Novel
Francesco Campana
The End of Literature, Hegel,
and the Contemporary Novel
Francesco Campana
The End
of Literature,
Hegel, and the
Contemporary Novel
Francesco Campana
University of Padua
Padua, Italy
ISBN 978-3-030-31394-4 ISBN 978-3-030-31395-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31395-1
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To my parents
Preface
In his famous and widely discussed essay Why Bother?, now present in
the collection How to Be Alone, Jonathan Franzen questions the mean-
ing of a literary genre such as the social novel for the contemporary
world and is struck by its manifest loss of centrality in society, especially
in comparison with the past. His essay, which previously appeared in
the April 1996 issue of Harper’s magazine with the title Perchance to
Dream: In the Age of Images, a Reason to Write Novels, sums the prob-
lem up in the following way: ‘In the nineteenth century, when Dickens
and Darwin and Disraeli all read one another’s work, the novel was the
preeminent medium of social instruction. A new book by Thackeray
or William Dean Howells was anticipated with the kind of fever that
a late-December film release inspires today’ (Franzen 2002, 65). Mass
and consumer society, with its new technologies and chaotic network of
information, has led to the loss of the pivotal role that the social novel
and literature in general played two centuries ago. This happened in
favour of more direct and instant media such as television, radio, pho-
tography and even journalism: ‘Today’s Baudelaires are hip-hop art-
ists’, Franzen stated (Franzen 2002, 66). Through a long reflection on
his personal experience—he had already published his first two novels
vii
viii Preface
but it was still five years before The Corrections—and the discourag-
ing periods regarding his social role as a writer, Franzen tells us how
his perception of literature gradually changed: in the abandonment of
a ‘depressive realism’ and in the passage ‘from being immobilized by
darkness to being sustained by it’ (Franzen 2002, 92), he rediscovers
a renewed sense of trust as a writer who paradoxically believes in the
potentialities of literature even today. He adopts an attitude that he calls
‘tragic realism’, which is an approach to things that, without simplifying
conflicts in empty and hypocritical banalities, preserves complexity and
the possibility of ‘access to the dirt behind the dream of Chosenness—
to the human difficulty beneath the technological ease, to the sorrow
behind the pop-cultural narcosis: to all those portents on the margins
of our existence’ (Franzen 2002, 92). This happened thanks to a series
of personal circumstances, ranging from the discovery of the works of
the anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath on the emancipatory poten-
tial of reading fiction up to a letter he received from Don DeLillo that
placed writing as a form of freedom and personal self-salvation bearing
moments of relevance (though increasingly rare) even in contemporary
society. By means of the writer, Franzen tells us about a personal evolu-
tion that took place through individual circumstances, but which also
has the character of a historical-cultural analysis, as well as a critical-lit-
erary one.
Franzen’s essay is explicitly connected with a famous debate around
the possibility of the ‘great American (social) novel’. At the same time,
less explicitly, it is also one of the latest contributions of another long
tradition, which developed in a more international context, namely
that of the end of the novel and, even more generally, the end of litera-
ture, which was itself part of the discourse on the end of art. The quarrel
around the end of art has countless variations, made up of continuous
declarations of the end (if not death) of art and equally persistent new
beginnings, and which has its origin as a theoretical discourse in Hegel’s
philosophy. For Hegel, art in modernity loses its centrality and becomes
‘a thing of the past’, reaching a degree of awareness of itself that perhaps
even pushes it to become something else.
Especially in the twentieth century, the tradition of the end of art
has often been evoked in the attempt to understand the radical and
Preface ix
apparently irreversible changes that the field of the arts has undergone.
In fact, if one looks at figurative art in particular (but such a discourse
could also be put forward for other art forms, such as music, dance and
architecture), something really seems to have changed. Mainly through
the revolutions of the historical avant-gardes and the new avant-gardes,
figurative art as it has generally been presented and conceived for centu-
ries seems to have disappeared. A new way of making and perceiving art
seems to have taken over, which no longer offers us an aesthetic experi-
ence to enjoy on a sensory level, but rather disorients and questions us
from many directions. If one compares a gallery of Renaissance works
and an international festival of contemporary art, the radical turning
point seems evident.
Given this background, the basic question of this book is: Does the
same shift happen in literature? Has literature experienced a radical and
irreversible change analogous to the figurative arts? Does literature share
with figurative arts (and other arts) the same fate towards its end?
The answer I intend to give is no. Literature deals with its end in a
very peculiar way. It does not seem to have experienced a definitive and
unavoidable change but has shown—with the means and in the ways
that are proper to it—a capacity for resisting its end through contin-
uous self-renewal. But then, does literature experience its own end or
does it keep itself completely unaffected by a process of ending? And if
it experiences any end, even in resistance to it, what kind of end are we
talking about? What kind of literature is produced after the end of art?
What kind of literature emerges after literature?
I will argue my position by showing that literature bears key differ-
ences compared to other arts. I will dwell on that difference which,
within the common sphere of art in general, distinguishes literature
from the rest of the arts. Then, I will retrace various traditions regard-
ing the end of art, literature and the novel. Within these traditions and
returning to their origin, I will therefore propose an interpretative key
in the wake of Hegelian philosophy that aims to understand some fun-
damental trends of contemporary literature as ways that literature has
found to resist its end. I will show how literature, remaining itself and
without going through the upheavals that other arts have gone through,
x Preface
has found its own specific strategies to go through its own end. This
book thus attempts to investigate the way literature faces its end and
unfolds how it continuously (and perhaps since forever) puts an end to
its own end.
Padua, Italy Francesco Campana
Reference
Franzen, J. (2002). Why Bother? In J. Franzen, How to Be Alone. Essays
(pp. 55–96). New York: HarperCollins.
Acknowledgements
A book could be worse than it is if there was not someone telling you
how you could improve it. For this reason, I am indebted to a large
number of encounters, discussions and common reflections.
This study is the reworking of a substantial part of my doctoral dis-
sertation discussed in Padua in March 2016.
Much of the knowledge in this book goes through the years of
attendance at the ‘legendary’ seminar Temi e problemi della filosofia clas-
sica tedesca, organised by Professors Francesca Menegoni, Luca Illetterati
and Antonio Nunziante at the University of Padua. My sincere thanks
go to them and to the participants of this seminar. I would also like to
thank the hegelpd—Classical German Philosophy Research Group of the
same university for all these extraordinary years.
During my Ph.D. years, I had the opportunity to spend two periods
as a visiting Ph.D. student that have been fundamental. The first one at
the Forschungszentrum für Klassische Deutsche Philosophie/Hegel-Archiv of
the Ruhr-Universität Bochum under the supervision of Professor Birgit
Sandkaulen. I would like to thank her most sincerely for her hospitality
and for the advice she has continued to give me over the years. The sec-
ond period was spent at the Philosophy Department of the Columbia
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