Month: December 2025

Fiction: the foundry of moral imagination?

In the novel Hard Times, Charles Dickens presents a retired hardware merchant, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, as a rationalist and disarmingly naïve utilitarian. He seeks to banish emotion from all decision-making and has tried to raise his five children to do the same, naming each after prominent utilitarians. The list of characters in my edition[1] labels his youngest son – his namesake, Thomas without the “Mr.” – as “a selfish, ill-natured whelp.” The opening chapter starts with Mr. Gradgrind haranguing a schoolmaster:

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum uses this novel and a few others, as well as the poetry of Walt Whitman, to address a question I puzzle over almost every day. Why do we bother with fiction?

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The route to publication – cover creation

A famous aphorism about life in general draws its analogy from books:

You can’t judge a book by its cover

It’s a warning against leaping to a conclusion, or judging people or things by their appearance. It reminds us that beauty is more than skin deep, and that two swallows don’t make a summer.

There’s much empirical evidence in the book trade, however, that – like it or not – the cover of a book sells the story, even if it doesn’t tell it.

And this: We also know that artificial intelligence is worming its way into all our lives. Here’s a tale of cover creation, from first-hand experience.

Many of the writers I know moan about covers and publishers. Rarely does an author – other than a completely self-published one – have editorial control over the cover design. Big publishers have professional design crews, who often seem to bully writers. Many independent publishers use templates that permit only small modifications of art and typeface.

Living up to the aphorism, such formulas of cover design point to something generic, to which genre the book adheres. The cover is a tool of categorization, a typecasting, not a description of the individual distinctiveness of a piece of writing.

But what happens if we throw artificial intelligence into the mix – as a cost saving tool and to break the stranglehold of templates and categories? Having just been through the process with my novel, The Fleetwood Half-Orphan Asylum, here’s an account of what transpired and what it inspired. …

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Enacting and exploring ideas in fiction: ‘The Overstory’ and ‘The Portable Veblen’

By Donald Nordberg, manuscript accepted and published in 2024: New Writing 21(1), 73-93. doi: 10.1080/14790726.2023.2222098

Abstract: Philosophically engaged fiction often employs ideas in ways that reflect the exploitation-exploration dilemma in developmental psychology: by exploiting well articulated theories by enacting their conflicts, or by exploring the uncertainties of puzzling ontologies or moral complexities. We can see this in action in many works, but some novels of ideas seek to defy such categorization, with lessons for readers and writers. This paper analyzes two recent works – The Overstory by Richard Powers (2018) and Elizabeth McKenzie’s The Portable Veblen (2016) – to show how they deal with related concerns and settings through very different approaches. While Powers offers an enactment, its complexity seeks to evade the book becoming a simple polemic. McKenzie’s protagonist explores her muddled identity, philosophy and much else while flirting with the enactment of ideas when she does not comprehend.

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Enactment or Exploration: Two Roles for Philosophy in the Novel of Ideas

By Donald Nordberg, manuscript of a paper published in Philosophy and Literature (2023), Vol. 47, Issue 1, pp. 108-127; doi:10.1353/phl.2023.a899681; © Johns Hopkins University Press, please cite published version

Abstract. I examine the often-denigrated concept of the novel of ideas from its inception and critical decline to its relatively recent revival. Using a variant of the exploitation-exploration dilemma in psychology, I suggest that early usage referred to works that exploit philosophical principles—or better, enact them—by setting philosophical positions in conflict. By contrast, use of the concept for more recent works sees characters and plots exploring philosophical stances. The shift corresponds with the greater attention paid to complexity and ambiguity that are hallmarks of continental philosophy and neopragmatism, and with it greater need to explore philosophical stances through fiction.

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Category choice in creative writing

By Donald Nordberg, manuscript accepted for publication in 2021 at New Writing (Routledge, https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2020.1855200)

Abstract: Would-be writers of fiction face choices as soon as they start thinking about how to get published: What sort of a work is this? Where will the book sit on the shelf? What does the publisher tell the reader about what to expect? And then, where does it sit in company of other works, and where do you sit in the company of other writers? This paper examines three such questions of category choice: plot versus character, genre versus literary, psychology versus philosophy. It asks how do writers – and audiences – make sense of a work of fiction, and with what implications for the process of writing? It suggests how writers might use the differences between them to enhance the experience of reading beyond the expectations set by the categories to which the works have been placed.

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