Inventing the Novel uses the work of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) to explore the ancient origins of the modern novel. The analysis focuses on one of the most elusive works of classical antiquity, the Satyrica, written by Nero's courtier, Petronius Arbiter (whose singular suicide, described by Tacitus, is as famous as his novel). Petronius was the most lauded ancient novelist of the twentieth century and the Satyrica served as the original model for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925), as well as providing the epigraph for T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), and the basis for Fellini Satyricon (1969). Bakhtin's work on the novel was deeply informed by his philosophical views: if, as a phenomenologist, he is a philosopher of consciousness, as a student of the novel, he is a philosopher of the history of consciousness, and it is the role of the novel in this history that held his attention. This volume seeks to lay out an argument in four parts that supports Bakhtin's sweeping assertion that the Satyrica plays an "immense" role in the history of the novel, beginning in Chapter 1 with his equally striking claim that the novel originates as a new way of representing time and proceeding to the question of polyphony in Petronius and the ancient novel.
Author(s): R. Bracht Branham
Series: Classics in Theory
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: xvi+225
Cover
Inventing the Novel: Bakhtin and Petronius Face to Face
Copyright
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CONTENTS
Prologue: The Argument
Introduction: Bakhtin and Petronius
Lost and Found
Digression: Biographical Syncrisis of Bakhtin and Petronius
Back to Bakhtin
Starting Points
Toward a Final Vocabulary
Thinking Circles around Bakhtin
The Utterance
1: Inventing the Novel: The Bakhtinian Model
2: Mapping Time and Space in Ancient Fiction: Toward An Historical Poetics
Chronotopics
ADVENTURE-TIME
CHRONOTOPES IN ROMAN FICTION
3: The Poetics of Genre: Bakhtin/Menippus/Petronius
Bakhtin on the Seriocomic
Epic and Novel: A Digression
Bakhtin and Menippus
4: Discourse in a Novel
Toward a Typology of Narrative Discourse: Plato and Bakhtin
Trimalchio’s Last Words
Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée
Trimalchio’s Double-Voiced Discourse: The Riddle of the Sibyl
Fortunata’s Voice: On the Boundaries of Discourse
What Does Polyphony Sound Like?
ANCIENT EXAMPLES?
Epilogue: The Last Word
Appendices
APPENDIX A BAKHTIN AND THE COLLAPSE OF THE FACT–VALUE DICHOTOMY
APPENDIX B THE WRATH OF HERMEROS
APPENDIX C NOMEN OMEN: EUMOLPUS’S NAME AND DISCOURSE
APPENDIX D PETRONIUS’S TITLE AS DISCOURSE
WORKS CITED
Works by Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle
Other Sources
INDEX
