On the far banks of the Attoyac, a forum dedicated for inquiry into the form of the novel as expanded by the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin and envisioned by Simone Weil--". . .something equivalent to the actual density of the real. . ."
In association with The Society for the Appreciation of the PostDialogic novel, the center subscribes to and publishes the ongoing development of the Society's Manifesto. It proposes to be a document for an analytical criteria of the novel.
MANIFESTO NEWS:
A fellow of the Center posts a weblog, with frequent updates. We urge you to visit story behind the story.
Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is out, with an abundance of hoopla. We are interested in the medium range forecast; here's an early view. John Leonard weighs in here.
The Center is pleased to acknowledge the presence of an excellent site on the works of William Gaddis. You are hereby urged to visit.
The web facsimile of the first Ulysses edition is back online.
The Battle to Define the Future of the Book in the Digital World, at firstmonday.org.
One would do well to pay attention to Tom LeClair's thoughts on the novel.
Two articles of note in The New Republic: Mario Vargas Llosa on the necessity of reading, and an antidote to John Leonard's rave on Richard Powers.
"William Vollmann works the sewer romanticism of our time." While there is ambition to be lauded in Vollmann, particularly with the Seven Dreams series in which he attempts a wildly imaginative history of the North American continent, Lee Siegel provides a needed corrective on the sloppier aspects of his thinking.
An interesting dialectic on what's at stake for the current maximalists can be found in this essay on Carver by Sven Birkerts.
Did Richard Powers write "perhaps the most daunting American novel since Moby-Dick?" Perhaps not, but John Leonard, effusions aside, considers his career with aplomb in The New York Review of Books.
The Dalkey Archive Press site is now subsumed under The Center for Book Culture, which has a casebook for Gass's The Tunnel--a laudable effort for those seeking serious critical work on the web.
"A novel is the freest, richest, most subtle form of storytelling there is." Read an interview with John Dufresne.
For some thoughts on Minimalism, see elimae.
A society member rebuts a recent misjudgment upon David Foster Wallace.
Richard Powers makes statements on the electronic future in Context.
(news Archive)(the defunct Society)