How Do You Solve A Problem Like A Novel?

How is it that novels came to exist is one of the oldest questions in literary and cultural criticism. How is it that we as critics, students, general readers, and lovers of culture attempt to answer that question — where do novels come from? what are kind of work do they do in the world? how is it that the world that we live in is still influenced by or conscripted by novels — calls up a host of other important though complex considerations.

Most likely you have never thought about a novel, outside of whether or not to buy one to read on your plane flight to college or vacation. Certainly if you have reached an age where you are in college then you have read a novel. Certainly if you are reading this then you have seen something -- a movie, a television show, a video game such as Quake -- something, anything, that has been based on a novel. But most likely you have never thought about the novel itself as a creature that lives, functions, and creates havoc in the world. I would guess that you have never thought of the novel as something that makes you who you are today.

So welcome to thinking about the novel. We will let ourselves take the time to range among extraordinarily different ideas by disparate thinkers who engaged questions such as, how is it that such an object, or creature, or totally new "thing," came into the world sometime in the late 17th and early 18th centuries? Why do we study this question here, in an English Department? It may seem like a trival object yet it is a large mechanism in how we (me and you) construct the narratives we live our lives by locally and nationally.

The interesting thing about art, any art, is that it takes time and money to accomplish. If you don't think so, try it yourself. You have to buy the supplies, even if that supply is the time to make it; you have to gather yourself enough to sit down and write, draw, think, sketch, paint, sculpt, type, compose, code, imagine, think, or even feel enough to create something out there in the world. The material aspects of creation: this is our starting point. Congratulations on having that time. Now, come to class. You and/or your parents paid for it. Join a bunch of other folk who want to know about this thing that we call a novel.

Tyler Curtain, Durham, North Carolina, 2003