ENGL 333(F) The Nineteenth-Century Novel
Imagine this: a form of art and entertainment that purports to be able to represent
everything-intimate, even inaccessible human thoughts and feelings, love,
class, the city, shopping, sexuality, bureaucracy, social bonds, industrialization,
nationalism, even modernity itself. In this course we'll try to understand the
scope of the nineteenth-century novel's jaw-dropping representational aspirations: its claim to comprehend in its pages both the dizzying complexity of new
social, political, and economic structures, as well as delineate in finest detail the
texture of individual minds and lives. We'll pay attention to the fictional modes
by which apparently intractable social problems are resolved, through a sleight
of hand act we seem never to tire of, in the realm of romantic love. And while we
might think of the nineteenth-century novel as an Empire of the Little, endlessly
occupied with giving significance to the smallest acts of ordinary human life,
we'll think about the broader historical and social conditions the novel both represents in its pages, and is a crucial not-so-silent partner in promoting and contesting. We'll also interest ourselves in the kind of under-the-counter work the
Victorian novel does on behalf of British empire, as well as empire's own behind-the-scenes work for the novel. Since so many of these stories of everyday
life seem as familiar to us as everyday life, we'll work hard to maintain what is
strange and specific about the nineteenth century even as we recognize within
these works the birth of so much that is modern in our own culture. Likely authors include: Austen, C. Brontė, Thackeray, Dickens, Eliot, Collins, Wilde,
Hardy, Conrad.
Format: seminar/discussion. Requirements: 2 essays, one shorter and one longer, totaling 15-20 pages, class attendance and productive participation.
Prerequisites: 100-level English course or permission of the instructor. Enrollment limit: 25 (expected: 20). Preference given to English majors.
(1700-1900)