Rethinking Literary Naturalism

This book gives original readings of Proust and Quignard to elaborate a novel theory of literary naturalism. Drawing on contemporary biological perspectives, the book argues that, despite their opposition to traditional naturalism, both understand human experience, meaning-making, and creativity as being immanent to, and as emerging from, shared biological life. Rethinking Literary Naturalism reads contemporary biosemiotic theory, Proust, and Quignard alongside each other in the context of a shared genealogy that leads back into nineteenth-century philosophical and literary visions of natural life that are inherited from German Romanticism and Idealism. Here biological theory and forms of literary practice are recast as distinct techniques of thought that aim to situate themselves in relation to biological life. Each in its own way is shown to adopt an interpretative posture that ‘steps back’ into the immanence of sense and meaning that is constitutive of qualitatively lived existence. Each produces a different kind of knowledge (scientific, literary, literary-philosophical) of shared biological life that can be understood as distinctive variations of a saying ‘after life’. The novel literary naturalism that is rethought here can be understood as ‘post-dicative’ and as being entirely distinct from that of Émile Zola, Maupassant, or the Goncourt brothers.