English 125C

Other Readings and Media

Jane Austen, Emma (1816), Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856), Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877), Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Description

Focusing on key texts from English, French, and Russian, literatures, this course traces the development of the modern novel in Europe, from the early 19th- to the early 20th century. The texts are chosen to allow us to follow a specific thread: the novel’s engagement with the problems of family and home. As we read Emma, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Mrs Dalloway, we will examine the novel’s use of marriage and adultery as models of social order and disorder and consider the representation of consciousness in narrative.

Lectures will emphasize strategies of close reading and concepts from theories of the novel. In comparing novels from different national traditions, we will explore the interplay between genre and culture. (All readings in English.) There will be regular reading quizzes, an in-class midterm, a take-home essay, and a final examination.

This course is cross-listed with Slavic 133.