The Novel Experience: Reading Fiction with Nagarjuna, Nietzsche, and William James

The Novel Experience introduces new approaches to the study of narrative fiction, for scholars, critics, teachers, and readers. At the heart of this concise book is a conception of experience that is influenced by the musings of third-century Buddhist thinker Nāgārjuna on the fictionality of truth and the emptiness of reality. Combining this insight with Nietzsche’s method of intellectual genealogy and William James’s transformation of emotion into ＂pure experience,＂ Helmut Müller-Sievers proposes a way to talk about the experience of reading a novel that suspends the rush to judgment and ever-new ＂turn＂ in modes of interpretation. In its meditative corporeality, it is also beyond the grasp of any AI.

For Müller-Sievers, every experience is novel and every novel is an experience. He explicates this parallelism through philosophical works that privilege experience over knowledge (without denying the importance of understanding). Interspersing analyses of Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and James with personal essays about the lived experience of reading works like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O, The Novel Experience shows that reading about experiences in novels has a transformative effect on the reader’s understanding of what it is to experience. Teachers and readers should attend to these changes, acknowledging their singularity while creating a community within which they can abide.

Helmut Müller-Sievers is Professor of German at the University of Colorado Boulder and the author of several books in German and English, including The Science of Literature; he cotranslated Hans Blumenberg’s St. Matthew Passion for the Signale TRANSFER series.