The Novel Experience

Welcome!

This site is dedicated to two parallel insights: every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience. It aims to substantiate the conviction that human experience – once it is freed from the dominance of a fixed and identical self—is an open, singular and endlessly conditioned intersection of mental and extra-mental forces; and it argues that in the Western tradition, the modern novel and its avatars have become the medium in which we encounter the experience of others and reflect on our own.

Neither insight is wholly new. Yet bringing them together under the title The Novel Experience opens new paths for reintroducing experience as a central element in our reading of fiction—and for understanding the experience of reading in a broader, more urgent and more vital sense.

This collaborative website—grown from a book project that will appear in January of 2026 at Cornell University Press—offers a forum and resources to teachers, critics, and readers of literature interested in the novelty of experience and in experiencing novels and other fictional narratives.

The Novelty of Experience

At its deepest level, experience is a dynamic interplay of multiple conditions and forces—affective, cognitive, environmental, physiological, material—that may, or may not, coalesce into a discrete experiencer and a clearly defined event. Falling in love, raising a child, or biological evolution are experiences that defy the separation of a stable subject that ‘has’ or ‘makes’ the experience and a fixed object or environment that is experienced. Instead, they reveal the richness and the constant transformation and metamorphosis that constitutes what we call experience.

Experiences rarely have clear beginnings or endings. Only in retrospect—for example, through the narrative lens of a novel—can they be shaped into meaning and integrated with other experiences into the larger context of our lives. Most experiences, over time, lose their novelty for us and become routine or habit. But sometimes the ground gives way—during a crisis, in therapy, through meditative awareness, or in encountering the written experience of another—and we are brought to face the unsettling truths of our own experiencing. We also come to recognize the radical singularity of experience: that nobody experiences quite as we do.  

Traditions in the East have developed rich, often bewilderingly detailed catalogues of experiences and of the practices through which their openness and novelty can be accessed and preserved; Buddhist philosophy in particular relentlessly reminds us to separate the repetitiveness of habit and conceptual analysis from the unpredictable advent of genuine experience. In Western philosophy, too, experience is the entry point of newness into the world. Yet this newness is typically subjected to analytical scrutiny, aimed at separating the grains of possible knowledge from the chaff of bodily sensations. In this process, the novelty and the singularity of experience recede from view.  

On this website you will find a growing bibliography that lists, and at times briefly discusses, works that substantiate this concept of ‘radical’ experience both in literature from the East and from the Western canon.

Experience and the Modern Novel

As Western philosophy grew increasingly oriented towards the ideal of certainty, the modern novel emerged as the medium in which the unruliness of lived experience could find a refuge. Initially deploying a variety of distancing devices, such as the fictional editor or authorial irony, the realist novel harnessed industrial modes of writing and publishing to draw readers deeply into the experiential world of its protagonists. Readers not only read about other people’s (sometimes catastrophic but always difficult) experiences, but the reading itself, with its peculiar temporality and locality, its collective yet singular nature became a paradigm for experiencing as such.

The variety of these reading experiences—initially discussed in reading clubs, book reviews, or private conversations—was increasingly silenced when secular literature became subject to academic scrutiny. Entering the study of literature into the competition for knowledge meant passing over the richness of a reader’s experiences.

We want to encourage the articulation of these reading experiences, in which our relations to fictional characters become real in the comparison we make with our own experiences and in the resistance or attraction we experience in the encounter with the literary form.

The Bridge of Reading Experience

By reflecting on others’ reading experiences, comparing them with our own, and adjusting them in the encounter with new forms of fictional narratives, we can bridge the gap between the enjoyment that draws us into the reading experience and the knowledge necessary to understand a work of fiction. This bridging is especially important if we want to lead younger readers to the enjoyment of fictional prose and with it to the understanding of others’ and their own experiences.

We must communicate that no experience is more valuable than any other. However, experiences might be more attentively, more inventively, more truthfully articulated in a language that is the reader’s own. On this website, we invite contributors to share their reading experiences so that we can build up a searchable corpus; we also encourage educators to share their syllabi and prompts that help student readers to express what they experience when reading fiction.

Experience and AI  

As AI advances rapidly, the question of experience takes on new urgency. When entire corpora can be summarized and competently analyzed in an instant, interpretation through knowing becomes less central. AI prompts us that we must turn our attention to the process of human experience of reading: its embodiment, its communication, its versatility and maturity.

We now can acknowledge that—aside from professionals—people have rarely read novels to gain knowledge. Yet to say that we read for entertainment only is also insufficient. The reading experience we speak of and listen to has its own poetics: it is neither purely intellectual nor emotional, but something richer, more familiar yet difficult to define, and more crucial to who we are.

The Novel Experience initiates conversations not only with readers, critics, and educators but also with university administrators, as well as with AI itself. What are the limits of experience? What are its broader pedagogical and social values? What are its political contexts?