From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle
of the twentieth, the novel rapidly and forcefully became the most important
literary form in English: throwing drama into the shade, sending poetry down to
the minor leagues, and reducing to near-extinction that once important genre,
the sermon. In academic retrospect, it’s easy to understand why. Novels show us
men and women living their lives against the brightly lighted background of a society,
and when society changed as profoundly as Euro-American society did between,
say, 1815 (the year of Waterloo – and the year when Jöns Jakob Berzelius
discovered atomic decay) and 1945 (the year of the atomic bomb), the novel turned
out to be the most practical language technology available for recording the human
effects of the change in the form of stories.
So in English 340 this semester we’ll be reading some of the
novel’s memorable records. They will include a story about a ship in a storm, a
story about an airplane in a storm, a story about a man discovering who he and
his wife really are, a story about a man’s whole life told by the greatest
novelist in English, and a story about a woman’s whole life told by the
greatest novelist of them all, in any language. And you’ll see: thanks to the
novel and its way of recording change, Jukes and Captain MacWhirr, Winston and
Julia, D-503 and I-330, and Levin and Anna will have become parts of you,
helping you understand your story of yourself forever after.
Texts: Antoine de
St. Exupéry, Night Flight
Joseph Conrad, “Typhoon”
Charles Dickens, Great
Expectations
George Orwell, 1984
Evgeny Zamyatin, We
James Joyce, “The Dead”
Leo Tolstoy, Anna
Karenina
Assignments: Three
three-page papers, three exams, and final.