Does literature merely reflect the world or actually shape the future? British writer Peter Boxall from Cambridge University answered this question during his lecture, “The Possibility of Literature,” hosted by the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford. The talk coincided with the release of Boxall’s book, “The Possibility of Literature: The Novel and the Politics of Form.”
Boxall opened his lecture with a quote from philosopher Theodor Adorno’s book “Negative Dialectics” “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”
This quote reflects Adorno’s belief that philosophy failed to fulfill its transformative potential. Originally meant to guide humanity toward progress, Adorno claimed that philosophy fell short, especially in light of 20th-century atrocities such as the Holocaust and the rise of fascism. However, this failure gives philosophy continued relevance, as its unfulfilled promise means it must persist as a critical tool for questioning the world.
Boxall used this idea of the “missed moment” to frame his lecture, asking whether literature, like philosophy, merely reflects the world or if it can generate new possibilities and actively shape the future. By doing so, he examines whether literature remains a reactive art form or one capable of bringing new forms of existence into being.
In the end, Boxall concluded that literature, too, exists in this missed moment, continually producing new forms of thought even as it faces cultural and political constraints.
At the heart of Boxall’s talk was the concept of “postness” — the pervasive notion of the “after” in postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism. Quoting philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, Boxall asked, “Is the ‘post’ in post-modernism the same post in postcolonialism?”
This question, initially raised by Appiah, reflects on the clearing of intellectual space in the wake of modernism and colonialism, where new forms of thought emerge from the cultural residue of what came before. Boxall argued that this “space-clearing gesture” is central to understanding how contemporary literary and critical thought operates, especially now, when political and technological shifts seem to threaten forms such as the novel.
Boxall’s exploration of the “possibility of literature” was grounded in his analysis of Samuel Beckett’s works, particularly the novels “The Lost Ones” and “The Unnamable.” He examined Beckett’s portrayal of a world in which imagination is steadily eroded, and yet literature persists as a form of thought that outlives the cultural structures surrounding it.
To Boxall, Beckett’s famous conclusion from “The Unnamable” — “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — captures the tragic persistence of literary imagination in a world where critical thinking seems to be reaching its end.
“The Lost Ones” is set in a confined, barren cylinder where imagination is effectively dead, governed by a set of rules that leave no room for new possibilities in life for its citizens. Boxall connected this un-imagination to the ideas presented in “The End of History and the Last Man,” a book written by Francis Fukuyama, political scientist and Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
Fukuyama argues in his book that there is no real alternative to liberalism — he claims there’s no room for a worldview with the potential for other political or imaginative possibilities.
The lecture concluded with a Q&A, where the audience — composed of faculty, graduate students and undergraduates — raised questions about how Boxall’s framework could apply to various literary forms, such as ghost stories.
The final question of the night was posed by the Director of the Center for the Novel, Héctor Hoyos. Hoyos, a professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, asked how Boxall envisions new worlds in literature, given that his work does not lean toward speculative fiction (a genre often seen as the path forward for imagining new possibilities).
In response, Boxall emphasized that the possibility of literature is to produce a form of thinking that outlives the cultural forms associated with it: literature survives because its works miss their moment for realization in their own time.