In posing this question, we are in good company. Although the emergence of the novel has been linked to the rise of empiricism since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel, a wave of recent criticism has pushed back. Roger Maioli's Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel (2016), Aaron Hanlon's Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2022), Helen Thompson’s Fictional Matter (2017), and John Bender's Ends of Enlightenment (Stanford, 2012) have each allied the novel with knowledge that is not empirical: imagination, reasoning, relation, and aesthetic truth.

To take up the question of what the novel knows and what it offers to projects of knowledge, however, it is necessary to take a longer historical view—to ask not only what the contemporary novel can or cannot do, but how novelistic knowing has shifted as the status of empirical knowledge itself has shifted. This panel attempts to answer that question by tracing novelistic knowledge from the 18th century to the present. To leave ample time for discussion, each talk will be 12 minutes.

Kelly Swartz begins the panel by looking at the early novel. Tracing the early English novel’s relationship not to empiricism but to formal logic, Swartz argues that Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Charlotte Lennox’s Euphemia (1790) direct readers not toward questions of their truth or falsity but toward meaning derived from logical form. Through the structure of dilemma and paradox, the heroine’s impossible situation becomes clear: no matter her choice, because of her social placement and the structure of social obligations, she cannot be happy. These early novels convey knowledge of the contradictory moral obligations placed on women whose lives were deemed worthy of emulation. This knowledge has an aesthetic dimension: logical necessity is made felt as deeply devastating.

Next, Sonia Werner takes up the epistemological stakes of description in the 19th-century realist tradition. Werner begins with André Breton's condemnation of novelistic positivism in the “First Manifesto of Surrealism” — a complaint, she argues, that description by 1924 had already become too literary: too saturated with the conventions of nineteenth-century verisimilitude. Reading Zola and Flaubert, and drawing on Barthes, Jakobson, and Bahktin, Werner examines how description holds in unstable relation a claim to veracity and a commitment to aesthetic ornamentation. In Werner’s piece, aesthetic form is what prevents novelistic knowledge from consolidating.

Margarita Castromán turns to twentieth-century novels of the Black diaspora to argue that novels model knowing beyond the disciplinary systems that produce racialized subjects. Reading Erna Brodber's Louisiana (1994)—whose opening editor's note authenticates a protagonist who never existed—alongside Invisible Man (1952), Corregidora (1975), and The Chaneysville Incident (1981), Castromán argues that Black diasporic novels use faux authentication and paratextual devices to interrogate empirical formulations of evidence as codified the disciplines of anthropology and history. In this sense, Castromán argues that novels “know” by insisting we remember otherwise.

Moya (Moyang) Li takes the question of whether the contemporary novel, in its unmediated first-person narration, can produce knowledge. In contemporary queer archival novels, she finds what she calls the aesthetics of the evident: a thing the mind has been made, suddenly, to grasp—not the accumulation of evidence. The evident is not individual truth in Watt's sense, nor social typicality in Lukács's. Rather, it is a form of knowing whose criterion is not verification but the experience of being compelled to see. Reading Shola von Reinhold's Lote (2020) alongside Stanley Cavell's account of aesthetic judgment and historical objections to computer-generated mathematical proofs, Li contends that this mode of knowing, once the driving force of knowledge within mathematics—formal, aesthetic, irreducible to evidence—may now exist in literature alone.

Together, these papers show that contrary to the view that novelistic knowledge depends on empiricism, a tradition of nonempirical knowing persists in the novel from the moment of its emergence in the 18th century to the present.