In the fiscal year of 2024, Georgetown was allotted $195 million in federal research support, which came predominantly from the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control.
Since the start of President Trump’s second term in January, significant cuts in research and education funding have been made. With a projected $35 million annual loss, many university research projects have been disrupted or terminated, and graduate fellowship programs have been eliminated. Georgetown is currently working to secure alternative research funding sources.
As part of the Professor Research Series, the Voice sat down with research professors across a variety of disciplines to discuss their careers and recent projects.
For centuries, the novel has been treated as the definitive literary form of our culture, the primary lens used to understand identity, consciousness, and what it means to be a person. But according to Professor Daniel Shore, who teaches early modern literature at Georgetown, the novel’s dominance is not natural nor inevitable.
His current project, Against the Novel, challenges the predisposed assumption that narrative selfhood is universal and instead uncovers a wider, older spectrum of genres that once offered radically different ways of imagining what a person could be.
This conversation was transcribed and edited by the Voice for clarity.
The Voice: “Against The Novel” is a very interesting title. What inspired you to take on a foundational literary form, and why do you want to go against it?
Shore: So let me first say what I’m not doing. I love the novel. I love many novels. Rather, as a literature professor, I’m a lifelong reader of novels. Many of them are like my best friends. I am not trying to get rid of the novel, to banish it from the ideal republic, to even knock it out of its current position of market dominance in the literary market. My goal is deflationary.
Here’s the thing I object to: the novel has become the kind of model for what it means to be a person, and the novel has limited the ways of being a person.
And in the project, I situate that at the confluence of two intellectual discourses. The first, which is long standing, is basically as old as the modern novel itself, says that the novel alone is the genre that is faithful to human experience. The novel is the genre that tells us what it’s like to be a person, and usually that’s divided into inside and outside of being a person. It’s what it’s like to be in our heads and what it’s like to experience the world. So that’s one discourse.
The second discourse is much more recent, really. It’s something that arises in the early 1980s. The first example of this in philosophy is from Alasdair MacIntyre. In a traditional idiom, we would say that novels express the self. They convey what it is like to be a self. McIntyre and then many other philosophers after him say, no, the self just is a story or narrative that we tell about ourselves. To be a person, to be a self, is to have the kind of unity of a character in a story like the novel.
So these two discourses go together. One says we are the stories we tell about ourselves, and then the literary discourse says the kind of story that tells us what it’s like to be a person is the novel. And when those two come together, we end up with the idea that we all are novels. That’s what it means to be a person. And I think that’s a narrowed view.
The Voice: Are you arguing, like some philosophers, that people shouldn’t think of themselves in narrative terms at all then?
My argument is not the basic philosophical one which you get from philosophers like Galen Strawson saying, “No, I’m a non-narrative person.” He objects to being a narrative person. My argument is in favor of a differentiated system of genres people can decide to be people and understand their personhood potentially in a wide array of different genres. And my argument is if you look back before the rise of the novel in the early 18th century, to my period of study, the 17th century, you find a system of genres, where there is no single genre, that is held up as the norm of human experience, as the singular genre that tells us what it’s like to be a person.
So again, I’m trying to deflate the novel’s pretension to be the sole genre that tells us what it’s like to be a person. And to do that, I go back to the period before the novel to find other genres that give different and, most notably, non-narrative accounts of what it’s like to be first.
The Voice: Taking a look back to the 17th to the early 18th centuries, when did the novel become this powerhouse starting to understand personhood? Do you argue there really is no shift in genre?
Shore: But that’s not my argument. I think there is a big change. The change is in the 18th century when you get the beginnings of what I call the institution of novelistic normativity. That’s the first time you have a singular genre that even bothers to lay claim to what it’s like to be a person. Before the 18th century, there’s epic, lyric, romance, pastoral, georgic.
These different genres represent different ways of being a person in the world, different ways of comprehending time, but none of them claims preeminence. None of them say, I am the singular genre that tells us what it’s like to be a person. So, for me, the rise of the novel is the institution of novelistic normativity.
The Voice: What are the challenges you’re facing right now in your research? And if you were previously stuck, how did you overcome it?
Shore: I’m not stuck right now. I’m writing every day. I feel like I have progress to make. Here’s the primary intellectual challenge of the project, which affects me too: Narrative, novelistic, autobiographical narrative, writing the events of your life, starting with your birth, is so normalized that it is actually hard.
This is true even for me as someone who identifies, not as a non-novelistic person, but rather I dis-identify with narrative. I am not the story of my life. I feel alienated by the demand to tell my life story, and I, as a scholar and a professor, I have to self-narrate. I had to give you a little narrative of myself at the beginning of this conversation. I don’t identify with the stories. They don’t seem to disclose or to construct who I am in any meaningful sense of the term. They feel inauthentic.
Even still, it’s a challenge to look at a sonnet, essay, romance, or an epic, and say this provides us with non-narrative models of the self, the novel. Part of the claim is that once the novel becomes the normal way of being a person, it also makes other genres illegible, making it hard to read them as providing viable ways of being a person.The project is to recover those other ways and it’s sometimes hard to see them or hard to take them seriously, because they’ve been so marginalized.
The Voice: In what ways do you think your research will open to further discussion, or in other terms, what do you want scholars to take away from your research?
Shore: The novel is our dominant literary form at the moment. The New York Times put out a list of the 100 best books of the 21st Century, a bit prematurely, in 2024. Of those 100 best books, 61 were novels. Many others were memoirs that were essentially “life writing” on the model of novels, and only one was a book of poems. I’d like us to think about the effects of novelistic normativity. I’d like to expand the ways for people to be people, to expand the ways for people to conceive of themselves and understand their experience. And I expect I’m not the only one who’s attached to novels. Many others are as well.
I’ve learned a lot from queer theory, which is the kind of preeminent theoretical discourse of human difference. And my project is what in queer theory would be called, an anti-normativity project. I’m against the normativity of the novel. And I’d like to make more room for different ways of being people.
The Voice: Could someone make a novel, just using your frameworks and theories?
Shore: Queer theory doesn’t object to the fact that there are straight people, that there’s other sex desire. The problem they have is when that other sex desire becomes the only socially legitimate form of knowledge, of desire and of forming human relationships in a way that marginalizes all others.
The same thing is true. I have no problem with either novels or people. There are people who are deeply attached to and deeply identify with their life story. I don’t want to talk them out of that at all. The same thing is true. I don’t actually think novels, any particular novel, have to be different.
I do have a hope, which is, I think the novel, when its pretensions to superiority and exceptional fidelity to human experience, when those pretensions are deflated, I think the novel will be better off. I think it will be freer to be one genre among many, to kind of rejoin the community of novels without the false burden of being the universal model for how to be a person.
So I think my argument is actually, in the end, salutary, healthy for the novel as well. Now, what whether individual novels themselves will be written differently because they no longer entertain that false presumption? I don’t know.
Dr. Shore is currently on research leave for the 2025-2026 academic year. Those curious to learn more about Dr. Shore’s research can read his two published books and 13 published articles.
