The Coda engages prior theories of the novel which have unwittingly touched on lyric subjectivity as the motor of genesis in modern fiction qua the DQ. The Coda returns to Leo Spitzer’s seminal article “Linguistic Perspectivism in the DQ” (1948), in which the negotiation of lexicons also invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of heteroglossia and polysemy in the Dialogic Imagination (1930s and 1940s, pub. 1975), and Gyorgy Lukács’ understanding of a rift between interiority and exteriority as transcendental homelessness in the Theory of the Novel (1915). While several of the insights found in their work hold true, their observations often unwittingly point towards the lyric, rather than epic, features of the novel as a modern literary genre. Their insights show that novelistic fiction is everywhere impossible without the lyric subjectivity at work in the practice of sixteenth-century Pastoral Petrarchism, in particular in the Galatea. In his conception of the modern novel, Cervantes preserves lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment through the transformation of the figura of the poet into the modern madman (Alonso Quijano/don Quijote). This figura of the poet as modern madman is not particular to the DQ but inhabits the “center” of the modern subject.The DQ allows us to consider the foundational division of the modern subject: reason and madness.

This chapter explores the impulse to understand reading and criticism in the terms provided by the natural and social sciences, asking both what generates such an impulse and whether it can deliver on what it promises. Such an impulse dates back to the early days of literary studies as an academic discipline, if not longer, but it has returned with a vengeance in the early twenty-first century. The chapter explores two recent instantiations of the impulse: the effort to use Big Data to understand the history of the modern novel, and the hope to understand aesthetic experience in the terms developed by neuroscience. Each of these models presents itself as a radical departure from traditional aesthetic criticism, and promises to break down boundaries between disciplines in ways that would revolutionize how we understand the practice of criticism. Wittgenstein’s writing on language, the mind, and aesthetics, the chapter argues, helps us understand the misplaced assumptions and conceptual weaknesses that pervade these efforts. Instead of giving us the generalizing causal accounts that define the most coherent and rigorous scientific disciplines, criticism and aesthetic understanding arise from a kind of immersive experience, a prolonged encounter with a singular artifact, and one in which empirical studies have no clear explanatory role.