The Novel: Mediating Reality, Representation, and Expectation
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Narrative fiction has existed in variegated forms and diffuse iterations for millennia across the world. The modern novel, for some a Eurocentric category (and genre?), takes its early cues from medieval romances and later, Renaissance experimentations with narrative forms and themes – namely, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615). This protean genre of literary prose writing undergoes its most recognisable transformation in the long eighteenth century with the psychologically fraught works of Samuel Richardson (e.g. Pamela¸ Clarissa), the satirical and comic narratives of Henry Fielding (e.g. Shamela, Tom Jones), and the realist masterpiece Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Saliently, the evolution of the modern novel attended, spurred, and was in turn spurred by seismic shifts in European political, socioeconomic, scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic life. To be sure, the profound interplay between capitalism and imperialism pervades not only the content of the modern novel but also influences its form, its distribution, and its promulgation as a means of global control, appropriation, and proselytization. In this unit, we will train our attention on three representative works of modern fiction: Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811), Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1860-1), and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920). Although the list is by no means exhaustive, they do provide crucial and useful access nodes for our query into the novel’s comprehensive exploration of human consciousness, subjectivity, sociability, sensibility, morality, epistemology, spatiotemporality, class ideology, gender representation, reformation, and various acts of reading. Through the complex – and subtle – representation of characters (flat, round, dynamic, etc.), of readers (real, implied, initiated, etc.), and of “chronotopes” (actual, imaginary, renamed, etc.), the novel presents and mediates a spread of conflicts between the world of experience, the world of representation, as well as the shared and divided expectations that we (as readers, as protagonists, as authors) might have for the worlds we inhabit. Throughout the year, students will be encouraged to practise both close and contextual reading of novels, paying special emphasis on the nexus between character constructs, spatiotemporal forms, and individual/social expectations.
READING TEXTS:
I. Primary
Fall 2021 - Spring 2022 Sr.
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility, edited with introduction by John Mulland, Oxford UP, 2017. (ISBN 978-0-19-879335-9)
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations, edited by Margaret Cardwell with introduction by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-921976-6)
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence, edited with introduction by Stephen Orgel, Oxford UP, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-954001-3)
II. Secondary
Barker-Benfield, G. J. “Sensibility and the Nervous System.” The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, University of Chicago P, 1992, pp. 1-36.
— “A Culture of Reform.” The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, University of Chicago P, 1992, pp. 215-286.
Cooppan, Vilashini. “The Novel as Genre.” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited by Eric Bulson, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 23-42.
Figlerowicz, Marta. “Novels and Characters.” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited by Eric Bulson, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 123-137.
Keen, Suzanne. “Novels and Readers.” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited by Eric Bulson, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 138-151.
Pinch, Adela. “The Philosopher as Man of Feeling: Hume’s Book of the Passions.” Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen, Stanford UP, 1996, pp. 17-50.
Tally Jr., Robert T. “The Space of the Novel.” The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, edited by Eric Bulson, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 152-167.