Signaleminima

The Novel Experience introduces new approaches to the study of narrative fiction, for scholars, critics, teachers, and readers. At the heart of this concise book is a conception of experience that is influenced by the musings of third-century Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna on the fictionality of truth and the emptiness of reality. Combining this insight with Nietzsche's method of intellectual genealogy and William James's transformation of emotion into "pure experience," Helmut Müller-Sievers proposes a way to talk about the experience of reading a novel that suspends the rush to judgment and ever-new "turn" in modes of interpretation. In its meditative corporeality, it is also beyond the grasp of any AI. For Müller-Sievers, every experience is novel and every novel is an experience. He explicates this parallelism through philosophical works that privilege experience over knowledge (without denying the importance of understanding). Interspersing analyses of Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and James with personal essays about the lived experience of reading works like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Heinrich von Kleist's The Marquise of O, The Novel Experience shows that reading about experiences in novels has a transformative effect on the reader's understanding of what it is to experience. Teachers and readers should attend to these changes, acknowledging their singularity while creating a community within which they can abide.

Rainer Nägele's There and Away charts a series of autobiographical topographies or "topobiographies" that map a life beginning in a working-class village in Liechtenstein to the places he traveled as an émigré, student, and scholar (Innsbruck, Göttingen, Paris, California, Baltimore). Located at the nexus of Freud's elaboration of the child's game of fort (away) and da (there) and Benjamin's thought-images of his Berlin childhood, the eight placed-based vignettes of There and Away do not tell a life story but rather bring together momentary traces of encounters into a constellation, in which aspects of Nägele's life became legible to him while illuminating wider historical configurations. Nägele's topobiographies emerge from encounters and re-encounters with memories of specific places as they interact with significant texts by Friedrich Hölderlin, Paul Celan, and Walter Benjamin. There and Away thus meditates on what it means to return to the same places and the same texts at different points in time, each encounter at once familiar and revealing something utterly unique.