Office Hours: T 1:00-2:15 e-mail: kbluemel@monmouth.edu
W 7:30-8:30 p.m.
R 9:00-10:00 p.m. (electronic) Office: Wilson Annex 509
F 1:15-2:15
and by appointment
Required Readings:
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719). Norton, second edition.
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740). (Xeroxed handout)
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742). Oxford..
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Oxford.
Arnold Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns (1902). Echo Library/Print on Demand
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925). Harcourt.
James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Dover.
J. M. Coetzee, Foe (1986). Penguin.
Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (1957). U Cal Press
Recommended Reading:
Michael McKeon, Ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. (2000). Hopkins.
See syllabus for additional required readings available through electronic reserve by Bakhtin, Fiedler, Trotter, Woolf, Attridge, and others. Please see also course bibliography.
Course Description and Objectives: This is an upper-level, heavy-reading course designed to give you a solid understanding of the history, forms, and contents of the novel in English and of the approaches that critics use to try to make sense of the novel as a genre. We will begin with an examination of the origins of the English novel, consider the vexed relation of the American novel to this tradition, and end with study of a novel in English by a South African writer. To give a concrete meaning to the theories and categories that will characterize our discussions about this vast and various narrative history, we will examine each novel in terms of notions of journey, quest, or pilgrimage. By the end of the semester, you should be able to complicate or move beyond this initial figure of journey as you work on your final papers and formulate your own answers to the following questions:
Questions of History
What kind of “real” history do novels record? How do they create a fictional reality that challenges history or creates an alternative “intertextual” history? Can you discover debts and influences between novels of diverse periods and regions?
Questions of Form
What is realism? Are there changes in its importance to the novel? What patterns of plot, character development, and narrative technique emerge when you read these novels in terms of one another? How is your sense of a novel’s “reality” related to its formal design?
Questions of Content
How are journeys represented in novels of different periods? How are characters’ journeys related to their experiences of nation and place (cities vs. colonies, public vs. private spheres, etc.)? When or where does the idea of “novel-as-journey” start to limit your understanding of the texts and the genre? How do questions about race, gender, sexuality, and class influence your understanding of what the novel is “about”?
Questions of Genre
What makes a novel a novel? How are novels like and unlike other forms of imaginative literature and prose writing? What do the critics say? How do our novels support and contest the views of the “experts”?
Class Requirements and Grading: Class attendance and participation (10%); Brief (3-4 page) reflection paper (10%); Oral report (20%); Annotated bibliography (10%); Shorter (8-10 page) paper that incorporates at least one critical source (20%); Longer (17-20 page) research paper (30%) on a topic of your choosing. Guidelines for the final paper will be established later in the semester, but you should anticipate a significant engagement with the critical literature, an aspect of the project for which your annotated bibliography will have prepared you. All class requirements will be graded on a scale in which A=100-90, B=89-80, C=79-70, F=69-0. Within this scale, “plus” or “minus” grades correspond to the following example: B+=89-87, B=86-84, B-=83-80.
Please see my Policies and Guidelines.
Syllabus
* Please note: For purposes of assigning and preparing oral reports, daily reading assignments are divided into sections. All pages listed for a given day are due on that day.
Week 1: Charting the Journey: Prehistory of the Early English Novel
Jan 23 W Introduction
I will explain the objectives of the class, introduce the critical vocabulary and concepts that form the foundation for discussions of genre, give a brief historical account of the origins of the novel in English, its debt to the Puritan quest narrative (especially Pilgrim’s Progress), and prepare you with information about the 18th -century debates that critic Ian Watt alludes to in his writings. Watt's accessible and central study will provide the framework for discussions of formal realism and the early novel and, as you become more confident with the vocabulary and methods of genre theory, function as a sturdy punching bag against which you can measure your own and other more contemporary theories of the novel's form and development.
Weeks 2-4: Strange Surprising Adventures in the Eighteenth Century
Jan 30 W Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1-44
Ian Watt, "Realism and the Novel Form" and “The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel.” From The Rise of the Novel Berkeley: U California P, 1957. 9-59.
Feb 6 W Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 44-89. Brief paper on Defoe/Watt (3 pp.)
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 89-132
Feb 13W Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 133-178
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 178-220
ALSO, read “Robinson Crusoe, Individualism, and the Novel” in Watt, 60-92.
Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe will provide our first test-case for Watt's theories about formal realism and the rise of the novel. After discussing Watt's classic thesis about Robinson Crusoe and individualism, we will complicate it by discussing ways Defoe's narrative fails to adhere to conventions of realistic time, history, and perspective.
Week 5: Parody of Pamela: The English Novel Comes of Age
Feb 20W Richardson, Pamela, selections (xerox)
Fielding, Joseph Andrews, Book I: Preface (3-9), Chapters I-III (15-22), V-VI (24-29), VIII (33-36), X-XII (40-50)
Book II: Chapter I (78-80)
Book III: Chapters I-III (166-200)
Book IV: Chapters XII (292-93) and XV-XVI (303-312)
ALSO, read Bakhtin, M. M. “Epic and Novel.” Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1988. 48-69. Xerox on electronic reserve.
Fielding began Joseph Andrews as a parodic response to Samuel Richardson’s immensely successful sentimental epistolary novel, Pamela, but his novel took on a comic life of its own. In the process of describing the adventures of Joseph and Parson Adams, Fielding formulated one of the most memorable contributions to the theory of the novel, arguing that his fictional creation was absolutely new and defining it as a “comic epic in prose” and a “true History.” We will discuss Fielding’s relation to Richardson, whether his understanding of his satiric art conforms to Watt’s crucial category of formal realism, and consider whether Bakhtin’s theory of the novel is better able than Watt’s to account for Fielding’s use of parody, aristocratic values, and classical traditions.
Weeks 6 and 7: American Gothic: Romance and Horror in the Early American Novel
Feb 27 W Poe, A. G. Pym, 1-44. Shorter papers due!
Poe, A. G. Pym, 45-90
Mar 5 W Poe, A. G. Pym, 90-136
Poe, A. G. Pym, 136-178.
ALSO, read Leslie Fiedler, “The Novel and America” and Part I of the chapter entitled, “The Blackness of Darkness: Edgar Allen Poe and the Development of the Gothic.” From Love and Death in the American Novel. Revised edition. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. Xerox on electronic reserve.
Understanding the American novel on its own terms is hard enough, as Fiedler's compelling but strained theories might indicate; understanding its relation to the English novel, especially the English gothic novel which influenced Poe, is even more bewildering. Lectures will draw upon Fiedler's thesis and test it against Poe’s novel in an effort to awaken you to the wonderful weirdness, rather than coherence, of this development in the genre. Keeping our focus on the theme of journeys means considering A. G. Pym’s plot as a paradigmatic New World pilgrimage and asking how it relates to English narrative conventions.
Mar 12 W Break
Weeks 9 and 10: Nineteenth-Century Realism: Domestic Fictions of the Victorian and Edwardian Age
Mar 19 W Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns, (pages t.b.a.)
Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns,
Mar 26 W Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns,
Bennett, Anna of the Five Towns,
ALSO, read David Trotter, “Declension” in The English Novel, 1895-1920. New York: Routledge, 1993. 128-41. Xerox on electronic reserve.
Our study of Bennett’s Edwardian novel assumes that you have already been introduced to the mid-century Victorian novel (Brontes, Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray, Trollope, etc.). After reviewing the characteristic novel forms of English realism (e.g., Dickens) and French naturalism (Zola), I will lecture on the way those forms shape the possibilities for journeys in the late nineteenth, early twentieth-century Edwardian novel. In particular, we will focus on the ambiguous ending of Anna of the Five Towns, trying to understand its plot “declension” (Trotter’s term) in relation to issues of work, class, and gender.
Weeks 11 and 12: The Journey Inward: The Modernist Novel
Apr 2 W Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1-48
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 48-95
Apr 9 W Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 95-144
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 144-194
ALSO, read Virginia Woolf, "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown." From Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Ed. Hoffman and Murphy. Durham: Duke UP, 1988. 24-39 (also on Theory of the Novel. Ed. Michael McKeon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 745-.)
Plus J. Arthur Honeywell’s “Plot in the Modern Novel” in Essentials of a Theory of Fiction. 238-250. Xerox on electronic reserve.
This classic stream-of-consciousness novel exemplifies the kind of modern fiction Woolf calls for in her essays and is a version of novel-as-psychological-journey. At this stage of the semester, I will expect you to lead discussion after I provide the initial historical and biographical information. I will pose questions about how this modernist novel draws upon the Puritan quest traditions marked out by the early texts of Pilgrim's Progress and Robinson Crusoe and the later domestic traditions illustrated by Victorian and Edwardian English novels even as Woolf announces her opposition to Bennett’s fictional enterprise.
Week 13: Dr. Bluemel in UK. Research day.
Week 14: The Jazz Age: Continuing the American Quest into the Twentieth-Century
Apr 23 W Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1-50
Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 51-100.
Annotated Bibliography due!
ALSO, read Donald C. Goellnicht, “Passing as Autobiography: James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.” African American Review 30 (1996): 17+. Electronic article.
Written at the beginning of the period usually identified as the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson’s novel revises understandings of the modern experimental novel and challenges Fiedler's notions of the constituting characteristics of the standard American novel. We will focus on ways of placing Autobiography with Pym at the center of the American novelistic tradition. Discussions will ask how differences of race and region determine the shape of Johnson’s narrative and how that shape responds to the Western myths of pilgrimage explored earlier in the course.
Weeks 15: Postcolonial Literary Journeys
Apr 30 W Coetzee, Foe, 1-87
Coetzee, Foe, 87-157.
ALSO, read Derek Attridge, "Oppressive Silence: J. M. Coetzee's Foe and the Politics of the Canon." From Decolonizing Tradition. Ed. Karen R. Lawrence. Urbana: Illinois, 1992. 212-38. Xerox on electronic reserve.
Discussions will inevitably compare Foe to Robinson Crusoe and should lead you to questions about how both appeal to a specific literary, political, and social history; whether the novel form suits the purposes of the two radically divergent though deeply intertwined stories; and to what extent new novels can or cannot escape from the forms, contents, and (often suppressed) violent history of the earliest English novels of the 18th century.
May 7 W 5:30-7:30: Paper presentations during final exam period. (There is no exam.)
Final research papers due!