ABSTRACT
Every era believes that it is in the middle of total aesthetic change. In Kafka, infinity is lurking inside appearances, just as he recounts in his miniature story 'The Next Village': My grandfather used to say: "Life is astonishingly short". Every revolution in the art of the novel is individual, not generational. There's a little exchange the composer Morton Feldman once had in conversation with the painter Philip Guston, where Feldman observed how there were periods of history where everybody felt that the old systems were dying out and there were no new systems to take their place. Every great writer represents their own private epoch. Every novel is a mini replica of the universe, and its novelty will depend on the particular exaggeration forced on it by its miniature size. The realist novel and the Kunstlerroman: these are the basic hipster forms in New York or London.
