This seminar will be held on Zoom. Please contact the seminar convenor Monique Rooney Monique.Rooney@anu.edu.au for the Zoom link.

Mark McGurl has spent much of his career posing bold questions. What did it mean, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to reconceptualise the novel as a work of art? How has the novel’s institutionalisation – its re-housing on university campuses via the discipline of creative writing – determined its formal and thematic preoccupations? Most recently, he has written a book-length answer to what is, perhaps, his biggest question yet: what might the novel look like were we to see it from the vantage point of a multinational retail juggernaut? What place remains for literary fiction in the age of self-publishing, e-books, authorpreneurs and Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica? Should our critical attention be captured by the beta intellectuals of autofiction, or the alpha males of popular romance?

What, we might also ask, has this redefinition of the publishing landscape meant for comparatively minor literary ecologies such as we find in Australia? What space, if any, do multinational platforms leave for national literatures? And what might an initially self-published novel like Michael Winkler’s Grimmish (2021) signal to us about the shape of our literary moment?

Join Joseph Steinberg for a conversation with Mark McGurl at 4pm, Thursday 21 November 4.30pm AEST.

Speakers
Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia. He is nearing completion of his first book, a literary history of the rise of creative writing in Australian universities, titled The Program Goes South.

Mark McGurl is Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. His books include The Novel Art (2001), The Program Era (2009), which won the Truman Capote Award for literary criticism in 2011, and Everything and Less (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism.