English 180N

Other Readings and Media

Homer: The Odyssey; Beckett, S.: Company; Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther; Joyce, J.: Portrait of the Artist, Ulysses; Maupassant, Guy de: A Life ; Nabokov: Speak, Memory; Proust, M.: Swann's Way; Sebald, W. G.: Austerlitz; Woolf, V.: Mrs Dalloway; McKeon, M.: Theory of the Novel: An Historical Approach

Description

"This course will consider the history and theory of the novel form, reading both novels and essays on the novel. (Theorists or critics of the novel may include Erich Auerbach, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Dorrit Cohn, Margaret Doody, Gerard Genette, Kate Hamburger, Georg Lukacs, Franco Moretti, Victor Shklovsky and Ian Watt.) We will begin by reading an epic, that genre which comes out of oral culture that is thought to be the parent of the novel. We will consider specific forms of novels, such as the epistolary novel, the historical novel and the Bildungsroman. We will discuss the relation between biography, including autobiography, and the novel and the related notion of ""a life."" We will look at the language the novel uses for the representation of point of view. The reading list is tentative, as book lists require much time for reflection. In particular, I will try to reduce this overly long list. Ulysses may be replaced by something shorter or I may eliminate something in order to retain Ulysses. "