The Novel, Literary Genre

Abstract

The novel is a special literary genre. Born with the open society, its history is created by the aesthetic needs posed by this type of society. These needs are expressed at three levels: the image of the character, the image of the world and the image of the word. The people of open societies have a public image and an image for themselves. It often happens that these images do not coincide. Even in Modernity, the subject does not recognize himself in his own public image. The worlds of open societies are several and give rise to abbreviated images, symbols, which Bakhtin called chronotopes. Finally, the word of open societies becomes an aesthetic register of the positions of the speakers and social changes. The novel fuses these three images and becomes a cultural event of the first order, especially in the modern world. This conception of the novel is based on the ideas of Bakhtin and aims to go one step further.