This fulfills an Area II requirement.
The Rise of Novels: Nation and Empire
Warner, Spring 2004
The modern rise of novels, into a popular form of entertainment and a type of writing that claims to be literature, is deeply implicated in the home-building and home-improvement that secures England's distinctive national difference from the other peoples of other lands (France, the Caribbean, the Americans).
But, at least since the 17th century, novel writing has also been implicated in those acts of imperial expansion through which one secures other peoples and places as part of one's empire. This course returns to the "rise of the novel" narrative as first formulated by Ian Watt, to understand how the novel as a distinctively modern genre was shaped in its language and rhetoric to play a crucial role in both the construction of national identity (Anderson's "imagined communities"), as well as the expansion of the British imperial project. Hawthorne's attempt to write a distinctively American novel, out of English Puritan materials, demonstrates the flexibility of the novel as a vehicle for writing other than English identity. While we will focus our study on five major novels, written between 1740 and 1850, we will also read some of the most influential accounts of the novel from 18th and modern critics (Diderot, S. Johnson, Bakhtin, etc.). For a final paper, students may write on any appropriate novel from the Renaissance to the modern period, including modern novels where these issues are most salient, like Garcia-Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Achebe's, Things Fall Apart.
1: Introduction: a brief genealogy of “rise of novel” story; nation and empire; nation versus empire
2: The imperial project at the beginnings of the national English novel:
(Lafayette's "The Princess of Monpellier"--a very short "novelle"; and referencing passages from, without a full reading of Oroonoko, and Robinson Crusoe)
Criticism: Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
3: Richardson’s Pamela 1740: Ian Watt on the modern “self” and novel
Criticism: Ian Watt; Nancy Armstrong
4: Haywood’s Fantomina 1725, Fielding’s Shamela 1741, and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, 1742. the struggle around moralizing the novel so as to English it
Criticism: Denis Diderot (Eloge a Richardson), Samuel Johnson (Rambler #4), Hippolyte Taine.
5: Fielding, Joseph Andrews, 1742; theatricality, and the novel (week 2)
Criticism: Fielding (essay on character, world as theater); Bakhtin (dialogism, heteroglossia), Michael Fried (theatricality)
6: Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814: Austen harnesses the technology of “recit indirect libre” to write the “classic” novel of English identity
Criticism: Ann Banfield & Dorrit Cohn on narrative; Deidre Lynch on Austen's Englishness
7: Mansfield Park, week 2 (Guest professor: David Marshall)
Criticism: David Marshall, Fanny Price and the problem of theatricality; Edward Said and the imperialism of the “domestic” novel
8: Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter. 1850
Writing a distinctively American novel through a turn to toward a romance narrative of the English Puritan origins of America
Criticism: Perry Miller (American Renaissance); Lauren Berlant (National fantasy); Alexis de Tocqueville
9: The Scarlet Letter, week 2
10: open for reports
|
