Thinking through Thinking through Fiction: a round table

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a round table discussion of the ‘novel of ideas’, with Andrew Crumey, Sarah Moss, and Joanna Kavenna, as a starting point from which to consider some of the questions raised by the conference Thinking through Fiction as a whole; offering a conclusion to this selection of papers as well as an invitation to further contemplation.

KEYWORDS:

• Fiction
• the novel
• form
• philosophy
• pedagogy
• subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Amy Sackville is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing. Her books include The Still Point (2010, Portobello), Orkney (2013, Granta), and Painter to the King, forthcoming in 2018.

Sarah Moss is professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. Her books include Names for the Sea (2012, Granta), Signs for Lost Children (2015, Granta), and The Tidal Zone (2016, Granta).

Joanna Kavenna is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction, including The Ice Museum, Inglorious, The Birth of Love, Come to the Edge, A Field Guide to Reality, and (forthcoming) Tomorrow. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, the New Scientist and the New York Times, among other publications. In 2008 she won the Orange Prize for New Writing and in 2013 she was listed as one of Granta's Best of Young British Writers.

Andrew Crumey is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Northumbria University. His books include Mobius Dick (2004, Picador), Sputnik Caledonia (2008, Picador) and The Secret Knowledge (2013, Dedalus).

Notes

1 Amy Sackville.

2 The Dial, 13 April 1916.

3 The Financial Times, 7 April 2012. Mr Dyer goes on to reject, for inclusion in his list of philosophical novels, ‘fictions in which characters debate ideas and philosophise in the drawing room or pub within the unquestioned conventions of a realist novel’; this prompted a discussion of the tradition of the ‘philosophical novel’ that the constraints of space have obliged me to excise. But I think this model of the realist novel (of ideas) is worth bearing in mind as you read on, and as we read against it.

4 Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: UTP.

5 Woolf, Virginia. (1924) 1966. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.” In Collected Essays, vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press.

6 Professor Emeritus, School of English, University of Kent.