Theory of the Novel: Foundations / Spring 2020

Description

Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to pursue some area of novel, fiction, or narrative studies, this course examines a set of concepts that should provide them access to 1) the modes of thinking that characterize novels across the modern and contemporary periods and several different national traditions, 2) the various ways that critical theory has defined those concepts, and 3) reading the novel as a concept-driven argument in relation to other disciplinary discourses, especially critical theory.

The course begins by considering a long and robust tradition of critical theory focused on the novel. Why does the attempt to think about the modern world in dialectical terms encounter some kind of historical limit where that thinking stalls or breaks down? On what basis do novels nevertheless continue to be written, taught in classrooms, and circulated for the pleasure and edification of literate populations? The uneven development of theory and fiction in this respect invites us to go back to the modern founders of novel theory—Georg Lukács and Mikhail Bakhtin—and see whether their respective concepts of the novel form still helps us understand late twentieth and twenty-first century fiction.

The last third of the course will turn the tables on theory. Reading certain critical concepts through the lens of the novel, we want to consider whether novels have taken up the task of critique and how they ask us to modify our critical thinking accordingly.

Requirements

Consistent class participation, the facilitation of a seminar, a stint as class reporter keeping track of the concepts discussed and summarizing our findings for the class meeting, and a 12-15 page  final written assignment. In preparation for the course, we ask you to read 4 core texts that we will use throughout the semester’s discussion of novel theory:

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence.

We assume that you have read at least one, if not all of these novels and trust you will enjoy reading the rest over the holiday break. The required critical readings will be listed on the syllabus and, if marked with an asterisk, available either through Sakai or online.

For the final writing assignment, we have in mind a Vademecum of Critical Concepts to which each student contributes a significant piece. This assignment takes it as given that the novel “thinks” with certain concepts—some of which do double duty as components of critical theory—and asks the reader to do the same. At some point after spring break, the class will decide which concepts merit inclusion in this handbook, and each member will select one as the basis of his or her contribution to this project. This assignment will require you to provide a state-of-the- art definition of the concept as it operates in critical theory and then select two or three novels that provide for an assessment of the relative advantages and limitations of that concept. How, if at all, do these novels require us to correct or supplement critical theory’s formulations?

(The full bibliography of texts in consideration in this seminar will be built and updated on our Sakai site.)

Syllabus

W Jan 8-M Jan 13    Introduction:  Fredric Jameson’s Antinomies of Realism (pp. 15-44, 259-314) raises the questions we shall pursue during the semester: Why now? Why rethink the theory of the novel now? Can we read the form of the novel as its own best theory?

In addition to Jameson (https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fredric-Jameson-The-Antinomies-of-Realism-2015.pdf) we may take a look at:

• Armstrong, “How Novels Think,”*
• Leys, “The Turn to Affect,”*
• Bewes, “Free Indirect.”*

What do they mean by “the subject of the novel”?  How do we account for changes in that concept.

M Jan 20    Martin Luther King Day

M Jan 27-M Feb 3    Totality: Lukács:

• “The Inner Form of the Novel”* and “The Historico-philosophical Conditioning of the Novel”* from The Theory of the Novel (70-96);
• “Class Consciousness”* from History and Class Consciousness;
• “Narrate and Describe”* from Writer and Critic;
• “Critical Realism and Socialist Realism”* from The Meaning of Contemporary Realism.

Second order concepts include: dialectic, fiction, class consciousness, perspective.

F Feb 7     A Conversation with Fredric Jameson (1:30 – 5pm, Nelson Music Room)

M Feb 10   Temporality and spatial form:

• Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and the Form of the Chronotope of the Novel”* and “Discourse in the Novel”* from The Dialogic Imagination.
• Jameson, “The End of Temporality”*

Second order concepts: chronotope, genre, language, discourse, heteroglossia

M Feb 17   Narrative Temporality I:

• Deleuze “What is a Dispositif?” (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/gilles-deleuze-what-is-a-dispositif).
• Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth”* (narrative as problem solving device)

Second order concepts: ideology, structure, grammar, semiotics, narratology.

M Feb 24  Narrative Temporality II:

• Althusser, “On Ideology”*
• Barthes, “The Reality Effect”*  (narrative as form) https://ctlsites.uga.edu/eberle/wp-content/uploads/sites/78/2017/08/Barthes-The-Reality-Effect-1.pdf
• Greimas, “The interaction of Semiotic Constraints”*
• Barthes,  from The Neutral (pp.52-73) http://www.sholetteseminars.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/The-Neutral-R.-Barthes.pdf

Second order concepts: structure, narrative, ideology, literature, antinomies, neutral

F Feb 28    Colloquium on the contemporary Turkish novel

M March 2     Midpoint debrief and test case:

• Deleuze, “Rhizome”*
• Rancière, “The Concept of Anachronism”*

How do we read Pamuk?

Select, articulate, and demonstrate the critical concept(s) that work best for you.

F March 7 – S March 15     Spring Break

M March 16     Objects in the novel I:

• Marx, “The Commodity Fetish and its Secret”*
• Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”*
• Foucault, “Las Meninas” from The Order of Things*
• Auerbach, “The Brown Stocking” from Mimesis*
• Schor, “Female Fetishism” from Bad Objects* 

Second order concepts: Fetish, Aura, Representation, Mimesis.

M March 23   Objects in the novel II:  

• Freedgood, “Souvenirs of Sadism” from The Ideas in Things*
• Bennett, “The Force of Things” from Vibrant Matter*
• Boxall, “Introduction” to The Prosthetic Imagination*

Second order concepts:  thing, souvenir, materialism, intentionality, prosthesis.

M March 30   The novel as object I:

• English, from The Economy of Prestige*
• Illouz, “Best Sellers and Our Social Unconscious” from Hard Core Romance*
• Brouillette, “Book Hunger” from UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary*
• McGurl, “Fiction in the Age of Amazon.”*

Second order concepts: economy of attention, cultural capital, global markets.

M April 6    Workshop I

• Select one or two critical concepts that you have found key to grasping how novels indicate the need for and perform some strategic revision of the formal apparatus bequeathed them by the tradition in which they think.  Is the novel’s internal argument one already explained by some concept or set of concepts spelled out in the secondary materials for this course? Please post these preliminary thoughts on the Sakai Forum we have set up for this purpose.
• We make a first attempt at identifying the cluster of concepts that this class will contribute to our new glossary of updated critical terms.
• Abstracts to be discussed in class and during scheduled office hours.

M April 13  Workshop II

M April 20  Workshop II

M April 21  Concept papers due by 4PM in Box