The Novel as a Challenge to the Concept of Literature

Abstract

This article takes two supposedly emergent genres of contemporary fiction – »autofiction« and the »theory novel« – and holds them up to a critical scrutiny made possible through close analysis of Mikhail Bakhtin’s 1941 essay »Epic and Novel.« Bakhtin’s principle of the heteronomy of novelistic discourse anticipates such formal developments and suggests, rather, a nonformal definition of the novel in terms of the thought of which it is capable.