Fiction can derealize concrete settings into figures of long historical sociality

Evidence

The Crystal Palace first occurs as an ordinary geographic detail, but, in the course of the narration, the book de-realizes this figure. Plasticizing the signifier “crystal palace” into both imperial jubilee and diasporic despair, the architecture of the past and the infrastructure of the present, the novel is able to evoke a longue durée of historical sociality that contextualizes the domestic scenes it relays. Its first sentence tempers that evidently intimate phenomenality with the length of epochs and the weight of the great exhibition: “To celebrate Obama’s election, the Wiley brothers threw a party at their house in Crystal Palace.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 346

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concretely demonstrates how a novel performs ‘abstraction’ through a setting that transmutes into social structure — core to Kornbluh’s account of mediation.
• XREF: Ties directly to the reader’s ‘Antitheory’ chapter fight and her wingman-of-Direct-reference thesis: Evans is offered as evidence that fiction can be abstract without being disembodied, a counterexample to immediacy aesthetics.