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

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.