Unveiling the Unconventional: Regimes of Art, Literature, and Representation in 21st Century Left-Wing Literary Theory

In this article, I examine Timothy Bewes’s book, Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age, published in 2022 by Columbia University Press. My critical examination will consist of three stages: a contextualizing stage, which involves analysing the macro-ideological context in which Bewes’s book is situated (i.e., the status of literary criticism and theory nowadays); a synthetic exposition of the book’s main arguments, along with a critical analysis that highlights problematic concepts in Bewes's methodology and arguments. In the first part of the article, I will revise the genealogy of aesthetic regimes, as referred to by Jacques Rancière. These regimes are defined as the relationship between subject, world, language, and text, and I will  delve into how this relationship operates in the 21st century. In the second part of the paper, I will tackle Bewes’s primary (hypo)theses concerning the free indirect structure of the novel in a postfictional age. The key concept here is “instantiation,” which refers to the intrinsic structure of the novel. I aim to connect this concept with the notion of the “narrative unconscious” and explore the idea of authorial responsibility. Additionally, I will draw on Moretti’s delimitation of the modern epic and the novel, as well as Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism,” to analyse the relationship between the contemporary novel and the (post)ideology of  neoliberalism. Lastly, in the final part of my analytical approach, I will offer a critique of Bewes’s “totalizing” theory from a world literature perspective. Specifically, I will focus on the unequal dynamics of literatures within the capitalist world-system.

Full Text