Can We Trust the Novel?: Contemporary Fiction and Liberal Crisis

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For the best part of two decades, the developed countries of the Global North have been undergoing a crisis of trust in the institutions of liberalism. The financial system and the “free market”; the police and the legal system; the state and its intermediate bodies; the “rules-based international order”: all these institutional frameworks have lost authority with the public. As sociologists such Niklas Luhmann, Anthony Giddens, and Barbara Misztal have argued, liberal institutions in modern societies have functioned not only as objects of trust but as its very producer. Literary critics have likewise demonstrated how important the modern novel, born alongside liberalism, has been to the production of public trust. Now that liberalism is under attack from forces on the Left and Right that have mobilized critiques and voters in a manner not seen since the period following the First World War, how has the novel responded?

The interwar period of liberal crisis was characterized in the arts by the experimental ferment we call modernism. In literary circles, the authority of the nineteenth-century realist novel was challenged by radical experiments including Ulysses, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury, and The Trial, among many others. In a recent article on the emerging genre he dubs “Trump Panic Fiction,” Nicholas Gaskill has outlined some of the formal resources marshalled by novelists to address the contemporary crisis. In this paper, I offer a complementary approach, focusing on how, in their recent fiction, established novelists including Zadie Smith, Joseph O’Neill, Hernan Diaz, Susan Choi, Jennifer Egan, and Paul Murray have addressed the crisis in liberalism by reflecting, thematically and formally, on the relationship between the modern novel and the problem of trust.

Meeting ID: 986 0411 3146
Passcode: 104603