The narration of experience and the modern novel

The modern novel is usually connected to the birth of the modern subject.

However, despite the central role that the subject plays for our understanding of the modern novel, surprisingly little has been said about the novel’s relationship to one of the very defining features of being a subject: experience.

This genre-theoretical and narratological research project aims to remedy this deficit by developing a new theory of narration of experience in the modern European novel of the long nineteenth century.

Specifically, the project examines how two different aspects of experience originally conceptualized by Wilhelm Dilthey and Walter Benjamin as Erlebnis and Erfahrung relate to form in the modern novel.

The guiding hypothesis is that the difference between Erlebnis and Erfahrung offers two different ways to structure narration that partly can explain the modern novel’s rich formal variation throughout the period.

The project runs for three years and will result in a series of articles that throws new light on the form and structure of the modern novel seen through the lens of experience.

The importance of the project lies in constructing a new theoretical framework for analyzing experience in the novel that develops previous research within narratology and connects it to the more historically oriented research of continental philosophy, gender theory and Marxist literary criticism, as well as proposing new interpretations of central works of the European novelistic canon.