The Origins of the English Novel
The Origins of the English Novel
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英国小说的起源
DOI：
10.1086/391348
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发表时间：
1984
期刊：
影响因子：
0.4
通讯作者：
Michael Mckeon
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Michael Mckeon
伦纳德·戴维斯（Lennard J. Davis）的事实小说的目的是揭示和解释小说类型从先前的历史背景中出现的过程，在先前的历史背景中，文学类别“小说”（无论是名称还是实践）都不存在。伦纳德·戴维斯对其他研究中各种方法论上的失败（因果关系的确定性概念、因果关系概念的缺失、对影响力的严格文学观念的依赖）提出了批评，他提出了一种替代方法，该方法将重点关注那些被后人一致称为“小说家”的作家身上明显存在的深刻的范畴不确定性。 “笛福、理查森和菲尔丁都声称要开始一种新的叙事类型，一种新的写作方式，但由于没有确定明确的惯例，也没有使用真正的术语来定义他们的尝试，他们每个人都必须粗略地创建他们的作品可能所属的类别”（第161页）。 “这里的目的是找到 17 世纪和 18 世纪的读者可能使用的类别和分类法——甚至是无意识的——来划分我们现在称为叙事的整个文本范围”（第 8 页）。为此，“小说本身被视为……话语，也就是说，按照[米歇尔]福柯的说法，构成小说的书面文本的整体（并以此定义、限制和描述它）。这个整体绝不只包括小说和文学批评”（第7页）。这种方法看起来不是“因果关系、线性影响，而是断裂和转变”。同时，它还包含“一种相当特殊的历史唯物主义”。 “按照这种观点，小说被视为强化特定意识形态的话语，它的形成必须被视为与特定权力关系联系在一起”（第9页）。戴维斯对这部小说的看法的核心是一种“矛盾的反应——对作品的事实或虚构的现实的不确定性——这……是十八世纪初阅读现象学的主要组成部分之一，而在一百年前基本上是不存在的”（第24页）。他将小说的起源视为“……事实与虚构、新闻与小说的划分的历史，从无忧无虑的虚构性的运动……到笛福、理查森、菲尔丁以及后来的作家固有的矛盾心理”（第223页）。这部小说“以一种模棱两可的形式呈现——一种否认其虚构性的事实小说”，通过多种方式坚持其自身的历史性（第36页）。这是 17 世纪“被迫细分的话语”的一个问题（第 44 页）。戴维斯所说的“新闻/小说话语是一种无差别的矩阵，新闻和历史将与小说区分开来——也就是说，事实叙事将与虚构叙事明显区分开来”（第67页）。造成这种“破裂”的原因是什么？戴维斯否认浪漫主义传统的重要性，尽管它可能对文学产生了负面影响。
The aim of Lennard J. Davis's Factual Fictions is to disclose and explain the process whereby the genre of the novel emerged from a prior historical context in which the literary category "the novel," both name and practice, had not existed.' Critical of other studies for an assortment of methodological failures (a deterministic notion of causality, the absence of all notions of causality, the reliance on a strictly literary idea of influence), Lennard Davis proposes an alternative method that will focus on the profound categorial uncertainty that is evident in those authors whom posterity has agreed to call "novelists." "Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding each claim to be beginning a new type of narration, a new species of writing, but since no clear conventions had been determined, and no real terminology had been used to define their attempts, they each had to create crudely the categories into which their works might fall" (p. 161). "The aim here is to find the categories and taxonomies that a reader of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries might have used-even unconsciously--to divide up the whole range of texts we now call narrative" (p. 8). To this end, "the novel, as such, is seen ... as discoursethat is, in [Michel] Foucault's usage, the ensemble of written texts that constitute the novel (and in so doing define, limit, and describe it). This ensemble by no means includes only novels and literary criticism" (p. 7). Such an approach looks not "for cause and effect, for linear influence, but rather for ruptures and transformations." At the same time, it entails "a rather special kind of historical materialism." "In this view, the novel is seen as a discourse for reinforcing particular ideologies, and its coming into being must be seen as tied to particular power relations" (p. 9). Central to Davis's view of the novel is an "ambivalent reaction-an uncertainty to [sic] the factual or fictional reality of the work-that . . . was one of the major components in the phenomenology of reading during the early eighteenth century and which was largely absent" a hundred years earlier (p. 24). And he sees the origins of the novel as "the history of the . . . division of fact and fiction, news and novel, the movement from untroubled fictionality... to the inherent ambivalence of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and later writers" (p. 223). The novel "was presented as an ambiguous form-a factual fiction which denied its fictionality" by insisting, in a variety of ways, on its own historicity (p. 36). It is one issue of "a discourse that is forced to subdivide" over the course of the seventeenth century (p. 44). What Davis calls "the news/novels discourse is a kind of undifferentiated matrix out of which journalism and history will be distinguished from novels-that is factual narratives will be clearly differentiated from fictional ones" (p. 67). What is responsible for this "rupture"? Davis denies the importance of the romance tradition, even as it may have exerted a negative literary influence on the