The Novel Network group examines the relationship between the novel and the ‘everyday’.
Comprising academics from across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Novel Network examines the novel from a range of disciplinary perspectives: from the literary critical to the socio-historical, philosophical and ethnographic.
We consider:
We run conferences, masterclasses and reading groups which not only showcase the work of its members, but provide valuable training for our postgraduate student and future academic members.
Wednesday, 5 November
3pm to 4:30pm
Robert Webster 327, UNSW campus
Some of the most influential frameworks for understanding human thought, in psychology, moral and political philosophy, and cognitive science, have failed to recognise the quality, form, and significance of slow, persistent ruminative processes oriented toward experiences of moral shock or disturbance. Such experiences include, but are not limited to, profound loss, grief, regret, or injury, including those fundamental assaults on dignity that may be designated as status injury. Drawing on examples from the literary tradition and suggestive philosophical texts, Amanda S. Anderson demonstrates that rumination is a productive moral process rather than merely a psychological symptom of oversensitivity or endured trauma.
For more information, contact Sean Pryor (s.pryor@unsw.edu.au).
Presented by the Novel Network and the Literary Provocations Hub, UNSW.
Friday, 6 November
1:30pm to 4:30pm
John Woolley Building (A20), University of Sydney
In clinical psychological literature and therapeutic contexts, rumination is typically pathologised and regarded as something that should be minimised, stopped, or medicated. Amanda S. Anderson argues for a more complex and positive understanding of this habit of thought, which has been captured with notable force and variation throughout the history of the novel. This masterclass will approach the theme of rumination through an interpretive analysis of Anna Burns’s 2018 novel Milkman, which concerns the era of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Milkman addresses a range of psychological, moral, and political questions in a distinctively ruminative style, richly layered through the use of retrospective narration. This retrospective dimension illuminates the distance between, on the one hand, the unsettling and unnameable experiences undergone by the narrator and, on the other, the psychological and political categories available at the time of writing but not yet known, or not yet in wide cultural circulation, at the time of the events being narrated.
The inchoate forms of trauma and the moral reactions they prompt within the narrated story world, together with the retrospective awareness informed by psychological analysis and political critique, propel an ongoing, dual-focused rumination throughout the narrative.
ReadingsPlease contact Professor Vanessa Smith (vanessa.smith@sydney.edu.au) by 20 October at the latest if you would like to participate in the masterclass. Places are limited; a light lunch will be provided. Participants must have completed the readings in preparation for the masterclass.
Presented by the Novel Network and the Literary Provocations Hub, UNSW.
We've generated numerous publications and core members of the Novel Network, Frow, Hardie and Smith, edit the Oxford University Press series Approaches to the Novel.
The Novel Network is formally affiliated (via a Memorandum of Understanding) with the Society for Novel Studies in the United States.
