Technologies of Form: Productions of the Novel and the Network

The novel is a dynamic and complex form with a range of intricate and interrelated levels. It is at once a material object and a force that organises the way worlds are lived and experienced. The novel is thought of as a self-enclosed entity at the same time as it is understood as an index to a multitude of other texts and influences. The form participates in a variety of spheres -- from the economic to the cultural -- and can take on many different shapes depending on when, where, and how it is produced. This research considers the interplay between the novel and these networks: between theories of the novel, the conditions and practices of a novel's production, and the shape a text takes; between the way a text is accessed (whether in print or as an audiobook), the conventions it uses to produce meaning, and how the production of a genre might make new types of texts possible; between a world of lived experience and the fictions that a novel might construct. This thesis develops an analysis of these interactions across an array of theoretical texts and novels. A chapter considers George Eliot's Middlemarch beside work by Lukacs, Bakhtin, Watt, McKeon, and Armstrong; it positions various versions of the novel (from manuscript to serial, 'classic' edition to television miniseries) as agents in a network that determines their form -- what I call, extending Bourdieu, a technological field. Another section frames the role of genres in the production of meaning, and the way genres change, as technological operations: texts such as Zadie Smith's On Beauty (as print book and audiobook), Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red, and Tom Phillips' A Humument exhibit the use of material and immaterial techniques to innovate the possibilities of literary form and to 'transmit' a generic signal to an audience. Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Carl Shuker's The Method Actors, and David Mitchell's Ghostwritten then demonstrate the form's capacity to process the cultural data of time and subject (especially as they are informed by neoliberal and 'postmodern' operations), following the work of Bruno Latour and Friedrich Kittler. The conclusion figures this sort of transformation as a technology of love and is explored in relation to Angela Carter's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman through the lenses of psychoanalysis, political theory, popular culture, and communications/systems theory. Such research attempts to be attentive to the intertextual and interdimensional weave out of which the novel is constructed, to position it as an important and relevant technology for the contemporary moment and the futures that might be born from it