Reviewed by:

• The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life by Peter Boxall
• Zsófia Novák (bio)

What does the “enworlding” power of the “novel imagination” consist in? How does the world-making capacity of fiction relate to the junction between the mind and the body, where consciousness makes itself manifest? How and why does the novel become the form that is particularly suited to the exploration of that shifting bridge between the self and the prostheses by which it extends itself into the world? These are some of the main questions addressed in The Prosthetic Imagination, Peter Boxall’s latest book, in which the University of Sussex academic and literary critic offers a highly original account of the novel genre, conceptualized as the site where the evolution of the prosthetic condition—developing in tandem with and captured by what Boxall calls the novel imagination—can be most clearly traced. Rereading the “history of the novel as a history of artificial life,” Boxall contends, can help us come to terms [End Page 381] with our current, “deeply estranged relation to life, in which the distinction between the real and the artificial becomes difficult or even impossible to maintain” (13). Thus, the author sets out to map the dynamics of the prosthetic imagination as it emerges throughout the novel’s progress, exploring the “unfolding processes by which mind has employed prosthetic and mimetic forms to extend itself into the world” (20) in a range of literary—predominantly Anglophone—fiction from the early modern period to the Anthropocene.

Casting the novel as the art form that is “driven and shaped by its capacity” (17) to access and articulate the elusive nexus between mind and matter, Boxall’s study aims to “articulate [the] relation between prose fiction and the technologies of embodiment as it develops through the course of modernity” (20) as well as to flesh out the intriguing contradictions that lie at the heart of the prosthetic logic, “the logic which suggests that the forms in which we know ourselves are always at a remove from us, that we are not identical with our manifestations” (14). The tensions that mobilize the prosthetic seam—as that “dissolving space” (17), that volatile ground “where consciousness comes into being through its encounter with its own apparatuses” (68)—run through the book’s chapters, which themselves become arenas for the movement from the mimetic to the prosthetic model “in which narrative, information, does not refer to the world but produces it” (11), and then on to the simulacral. The five parts (and nine chapters) of Boxall’s book are organized around the complex correlations between ostensibly opposed motifs—contraction and expansion, being and nonbeing, animate and inanimate, wholeness and fragmentation— revealed in the analyses as always already overlapping and intersecting. Such revelations expose the disappearing trick of the prosthetic imagination, manifested in fictional narrative which, by “joining consciousness to its prosthetic extensions, also, and at the same time, marks the distance that opens between them” (16).

Boxall’s chronologically structured volume, then, threads a history of the novel to delineate how the underlying fold “that intervenes between the living and the dead, between origin and copy, mimesis and prosthesis” (16) moves ever closer to the surface, investigating how the “work of fiction” (16), throughout the centuries of modernity, makes “of this amalgam of the living and the dead an integrated narrating agent” (16). Part 1, titled “The Body and the Early Modern State,” is concerned with the “earliest stirrings” (225) of the novel imagination, from More’s Utopia through Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World to Cervantes’s Don Quixote. According to Boxall, the increasing exposure and understanding of “the internal structures of the body granted by the new anatomical science” (17) leads, paradoxically, to a recognition that “the more forcefully the inside of being is brought into the domain of knowledge, and into the regime of the visible . . . the more insistently a certain unknowable junction between being and its extensions reveals itself” (40). These...

审阅者：

• 假肢想象力：作为人造生命的小说的历史作者： Peter Boxall
• 索菲亚·诺瓦克 (简介)

“小说想象”的“入世”力量在于什么？小说的世界创造能力如何与思想和身体之间的联系（意识在其中显现）联系起来？小说如何以及为何成为一种特别适合探索自我与假体之间的桥梁的形式？通过假体将自己延伸到世界？这些是彼得·博克索尔（Peter Boxall）的最新著作《假肢想象》中提出的一些主要问题，苏塞克斯大学的学术和文学评论家在书中对小说类型进行了高度原创的描述，将其概念化为假肢条件演变的场所——与博克索尔所说的小说想象同步发展并被其捕获——可以被最清晰地追踪到。博克索尔认为，重读“小说的历史是一部人造生命的历史”，可以帮助我们接受我们当前的“与生命深深疏远的关系，其中真实与人造之间的区别” [结束第 381 页]。变得很难甚至不可能维护”（13）。因此，作者着手描绘假肢想象在小说发展过程中的动态变化，探索“心灵利用假肢和模仿形式将自身扩展到世界的展开过程”（20）。从现代早期到人类世的文学（主要是英语）小说。

博克索尔的研究将小说视为一种“由其能力驱动和塑造”的艺术形式（17），以获取和阐明精神与物质之间难以捉摸的联系，旨在“阐明散文小说与体现技术之间的关系”随着它在现代性进程中的发展”（20），并充实了假肢逻辑核心的有趣矛盾，“这种逻辑表明，我们认识自己的形式总是与假肢逻辑相距甚远。我们，我们与我们的表现并不相同”（14）。调动假肢接缝的张力——就像“溶解的空间”（17），“意识通过与自己的装置相遇而形成的不稳定的基础”（68）——贯穿了本书的各个章节，这些章节本身也成为了从模仿到假体模型的运动“其中叙事、信息不是指世界而是产生世界”（11），然后是拟像。博克索尔书的五个部分（九章）围绕着表面上对立的主题之间的复杂关系——收缩与扩张、存在与非存在、有生命与无生命、整体与碎片——在分析中揭示出，这些主题总是已经重叠和交叉。这些启示暴露了假肢想象力正在消失的诡计，这在虚构的叙事中得到了体现，通过“将意识与其假肢的延伸结合起来，同时也标志着它们之间打开的距离”（16）。

然后，博克索尔的按时间顺序排列的卷，贯穿了小说的历史，描绘了“介入生者与死者、起源与复制、模仿与假体之间”的潜在折叠（16）如何越来越接近表面，调查如何贯穿现代性几个世纪的“小说作品”（16）使“这种生者与死者的混合体成为一个完整的叙述媒介”（16）。第 1 部分的标题为“身体与早期现代国家”，关注小说想象的“最早的萌芽”（225），从莫尔的乌托邦到玛格丽特·卡文迪什的《炽热的世界》再到塞万提斯的《堂吉诃德》。根据博克斯索尔的说法，对“新解剖科学所赋予的身体内部结构”（17）的越来越多的了解和理解导致了这样一种认识：“存在的内部越有力地被带入知识领域， ，并进入可见政权。。。存在及其延伸之间的某种不可知的连接越明显地揭示出来”（40）。这些...