The Modern Novel
Prerequisites: UCWR 110 and any 200-level ENGL course.
This course covers novels since the late 19th century and explores formal and cultural influences on the form.
Outcomes: Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the critical skills and theoretical insights necessary for discussing, analyzing and formulating arguments about the novel in the modern world.
Prerequisites: UCWR 110 and any 200-level ENGL course.
This course covers novels since the late 19th century and explores formal and cultural influences on the form.
Outcomes: Students will be able to demonstrate understanding of the critical skills and theoretical insights necessary for discussing, analyzing and formulating arguments about the novel in the modern world.
Pre-requisites: UCWR 110 and one 200-level English course.
The Fall of the Great House
What does a house mean as a symbol as well as a material and emotional space in which we dwell? How does it stand as a mediator between the inside and outside? What happens to a house when it undergoes change in family traditions, including hierarchies of class, gender, race, and ethnicity? These are all questions we will confront in this course in connection to a literary phenomenon: the novel. Throughout this course, you are invited to think of the body of the house (grand, alive, comforting, sinister, haunted, forgotten, rotting romanticized, unreal etc.) in connection with the body of the novel¿a relatively modern form in literary production. While we will focus primarily on Anglo-American novels, our texts will compel us to confront these English language texts through the networks of colonialism, slavery, and class struggle, opening out their superficially limited frameworks into a vaster and more turbulent world. Some of our texts will be: The Leopard by Lampedusa (our only novel in translation), Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, and Tar Baby by Toni Morrison.
Our goal is to be able to connect the diverse and vibrant literary imaginations of our chosen authors to questions of history and power. We will do this by paying close attention to language, form, style, in their own contexts and contemporary legacies. We will come to understand that a wide variety of novels, whether explicitly engaged with the supernatural or not, are fascinated by the ¿ghosts¿ of the past and find the house a fascinating site for exorcising/excavating these histories.
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