‘A thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest’ 1 : The Contemporary Anglophone Novel-Essay and Transformations of Knowledge

My doctoral research project is interested in the contemporary Anglophone novel-essay and the novel-essay's unique relationship to knowledge. By drawing on historical and theoretical perspectives on the essay and on the fragment I explore how the contemporary novel-essay transpose and transform knowledge in order to create alternative histories and alternative epistemologies.

The project locates the contemporary Anglophone novel-essay part of a recent renaissance of what I tentatively call literatures of knowledge, an eclectic category of literature which actively interrogates the relationship between literature and knowledge, and makes visible the way knowledge is created, transformed, organised and legitimised.