‘Every novel is an experience’
Top photo: Bhautik Patel/Unsplash
CU 鶹ӰԺ scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels
Helmut Müller-Sievers has an idea to help reignite students’ interest in taking literature courses: Rather than teaching novels as a source of knowledge, academics should encourage young readers to pay attention to the experience of reading.
“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says Müller-Sievers, professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature at the 鶹ӰԺ.
“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says CU 鶹ӰԺ scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers.
In his new book The Novel Experience (Cornell University Press, 2026), Müller-Sievers follows the lead of three thinkers with “radical” notions about experience—the third-century Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna;19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James; and19th-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche—and draws on his own experiences of reading.
“Fewer and fewer people are taking literature courses. We foolishly try to counter this loss by emphasizing what kind of knowledge students get from reading,” he says. “Because we are so focused on knowledge, we eliminate and, in a sense, prohibit the expression of the experience of reading novels.”
What was it like to read the book?
Rather than presenting a novel as something to be interpreted and or critically examined, the idea is to encourage readers to observe and communicate what it was actually like to read the book: Why did they choose the book? How difficult was it? How long did it take? Under what conditions—place, time, surroundings—did they read the book? Were they drawn to or distanced from the different characters? Did they enjoy it? Did anything stick with them when finished? How did the protagonist’s experience relate to their own?
In emphasizing knowledge to the exclusion of experience, the Western academy has promoted “an atrophied, mutilated sense of what experience is,”Müller-Sievers says. “We think there is a self . . . that is predicated on a division between the experiencer and what is experienced. James, Nāgārjuna and Nietzsche are radical critics of that idea.”
“The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers.
Where Western thought from time immemorial has argued that there exist stable, individual human “selves” that go through life almost as if watching a movie, distinct from their own experiences, Buddhist thought argues that separation between consciousness and experience is a delusion.
Müller-Sievers doesn’t dispute that there is knowledge to be found in literature or that it requires knowledge to understand and teach it in certain ways. But focusing almost exclusively on knowledge ignores the primary motivations most people who read novels: experience and entertainment.
“When people who are not academics read a book, they are not primarily interested in knowledge, but rather in partaking of an experience,” he says. “The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human.”
Müller-Sievers sees no contradiction in reading for both knowledge and experience and argues that sharing the experiences of reading with others increases interest and enjoyment.
“So, rather than say, ‘Hey, let’s learn about Thomas Mann,’ it’s ‘Hey, let’s talk about the experience of reading about an experience. We can find common language that makes it exciting,” he says.
Müller-Sievers also sees reading for experience as a “civic virtue.” Humans can never have the experiences of another in the real world, but they can by reading novels.Reading novels can help students become more aware of their singular distinctness from others and their experiences.
And at a time when artificial-intelligence continues to insinuate its way into nearly every aspect of modern life, he detects a clear, inviolable distinction between human and machine intelligence.
“Only humans can have experiences. AI can only imitate experiences by looking back. It always looks back; it has to look back,” he says. “There is no way to distinguish between human and AI knowledge. But we can distinguish between deep human experience and the retroactive intelligence of AI.”
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