The Society for the Appreciation of the Post-Dialogic Novel

The Manifesto

Herewith proclaiming!!

That the novel is the primary diagnostic tool for man's relation to the world, capable of subsuming all other gnostic disciplines;

That the post-dialogic specifically treats not the story of the individual so much as lives en masse, embedded within the complexity of systems;

That while in one sense a novel is pretty much anything that calls itself such, there are two trajectories of novels--one in which each example is the result of a search for its own unique form (which may eventually include hypertexts, immersive environments, and games as well as the traditional printed book), and another in which all examples are in pre-forms (genre novels) and so not novels at all;

That the contemporary literary novel is often yet another genre, one examining the always-recognizable turn of lives within the durable Chekovian model;

That qualities common to most gnostic novels (particularly the Encyclopedic sub-category, but even in Iris Murdoch's "crystalline" short-novel class) include duration time (Sven Birkert's term) and Henry James's "felt life";

That David Foster Wallace's distinction between recursive and referential writing is decidedly valuable, and our belief is that the post-dialogic reflects an essential blend of the two.

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