Getting Started - Why "Novelogia"

The suffix "-logia," in Greek, refers to "sayings" or "discourses," and our term, "novelogia," is meant to suggest an open and wise discourse about the novel, both the general form and the specific examples that populate our libraries and bookshelves.

In the teaching of literature (which I do for a living), definition tends to precede example. William Blake, we learn in our Romantic Poets class, is a Romantic poet. Then we read some Blake, identifying him with Romantic qualities. The English Renaissance, we are told, is a period exemplified by the rise of humanism. Then we read Hamlet, thinking of it in terms of our definition of Renaissance lit. Think of it as the Norton anthologization of literary education.

Billy Collins has a fun poem lampooning this propagandistic approach called, appropriately, "The Norton Anthology of English Literature." He begins,

"It is easy to find out if a poet is a contemporary poet
and thus avoid the imbroglio of calling him Victorian
or worse, Elizabethan, or worse yet, medieval.

"If you look him up in The Norton Anthology of English Literature
and the year of his birth is followed only by a dash
and a small space for the numerals only spirits know,
then it is safe to say that he is probably alive."

But not only does this pigeonholing tend to be inexact ― are Blake and Wordsworth as much alike as their co-membership in the Romantic poets club suggests? ― but it takes the fun out of discovering literature on its own terms. Too much of studying literature is focused on what things mean, where things belong, what accounts for the art and often these questions are asked prior to the actual experience of reading. What's more, the novel defies a lot of this sort of definition.

Terry Eagleton tells us "that the novel is a genre which resists exact definition[s] … it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together" (The English Novel 1).

To which we say, fine. Let's start near the beginning and watch the novel in its own habitat, watch it grow, evolve, multiply, defy, fail, and resurrect itself over time. Let's say that one comes to a legitimate understanding not through deductive observation ― all novels are lengthy fiction narratives in prose therefore this book I'm holding is a novel ― but through inductive observation. This blog is about reading (first) then talking about novels. It is about starting to read works from back when the novel was something new and therefore rebellious, with authors forging the genre as they went. And it is about coming organically to an appreciation of the form.

Please check your Norton anthologies at the door.

Randall