Rise of the Neuronovel. Marco Roth at N+1 argues that the recent interest of contemporary novels (
Motherless Brooklyn,
Saturday,
Atmospheric Disturbances) in the disordered wetware of their characters represents a defeat for fiction. "...the new genre of the neuronovel, which looks on the face of it to expand the writ of literature, appears as another sign of the novel’s diminishing purview."
Jonah Lehrer responds to Roth and Roth responds back.
posted by escabeche
on Jan 2, 2011 -
58 comments
"This is a novel born out of the intersection of two eras. The first is a story of the Cultural Revolution, a time of fanaticism, repressed instincts, and tragic fates, similar to the European Middle Ages. The second is a story of today, a time of subverted ethics, fickle sensuality, and every kind of phenomena, even more like the Europe of today. A westerner would have to live four hundred years to experience the vast differences of the two eras, but a Chinese would only need forty years for the experience." Yu Hua's
Brothers, a sprawling, foul-mouthed, comic-historical epic, and the best-selling novel in China's history, is available in English.
[more inside]
posted by escabeche
on Oct 18, 2009 -
25 comments
