Among other things

Among Other Things is Terrence Doody's staunch and stimulating defense of the novel's primacy over theory. Doody both uses and resists an impressively eclectic mix of literary critical strategies to examine a host of novels from the Continental, English, and American traditions, demonstrating that the novel, with its limitless possibilities, eludes any single theory that tries to encapsulate it. In the course of his discussion, Doody covers works by Cervantes, Austen, Dickens, James, Conrad, Forster, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Kafka, Hemingway, Beckett, Bely, Borges, Nabokov, Bellow, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Derrida, Pynchon, Garcia Marquez, Updike, Rushdie, and Morrison. In every case the novel comes first, he argues, because more than just another literary type, it is a vision of human experience without which our modern world would be inexplicable. Every serious reader "feels" his life contains a novel; no theory can evoke that response.