This course offers an opportunity to
explore, on a graduate level, a number of canonical British novels from the
eighteenth and nineteenth century. More
important, we will specifically be treating those classic works as active texts,
vitally important to the early development of the novel as genre, in a way that
can be used methodologically to the study of narrative activity in any novel,
no matter where or when it was produced.
This approach should prove useful in other graduate courses and in
giving new readings to already well-covered texts. And it is this methodology—the way that
narrative text works rhetorically both to expand and deconstruct hermeneutic
readings—that that will generate our study and discussion in the class.
Of all major literary genres, the
novel appears to be the one most obsessively aware of itself as a genre. This course will consider the historical
beginnings of this generic self-consciousness, examining how the narrative
activity of the novel texts themselves create
a theoretical discussion of the possibilities for a genre that is
only just discovering what it is.
More specifically, we will explore how novelists in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries encoded systems of rhetorical argument into the narrative
discourse of their fictions to debate issues of genre and to re-conceptualize
definitions of the novel as form.
We will discuss how incorporated into the
narrational texts of early novels is an underlying discourse on the subject of
narrative realism. In particular, we
will examine how eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists create underlying rhetorical
“discussions” about novel’s unique capacity to represent issues of gender,
class, and culture within the context of an increasingly commercialized British
social system—in explicit contrast to other literary forms. Along these lines, many of these writers
acknowledge within their narratives an implicit distinction between “moral” and
“ethical” discourse in generating epistemological meanings for a text; we will
consider how, as part of their rhetorical under-arguments, authors debated the
implications of this distinction for the novel as genre.
Also
on a textual level, we will examine the ways in which foregrounded genre
discourse in the early novel challenges pre-existing conventions for the novel
as well as the privileging of other, more established literary forms. We will identify narrational strategies used
to perform these rhetorical arguments, particularly the use of parody to
objectify the discourses of earlier novels and other literary genres. We will examine how these strategies work to
expose the deficiencies of other language systems for the evolving novel,
thereby creating a dialogical “discussion” between new and traditional
discourses carried on at the level of text.
Bakhtin identifies metafictional under-arguments as systemic to the
novel as genre, and this will be the foundational assumption for our study of
the novels in the course.
In addition to Bakhtin, our theoretical reading will
include (as hand-outs) Roland Barthes, Linda Hutcheon, Julia Kristeva, Margaret
Rose, and Adam Zachary Newton.
Student Learning Outcomes
- Advanced knowledge of major British authors and historically
important canonical texts.
- Advanced understanding of the English novel as it evolved through
the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries - Understanding of Bakhtin’s and other literary discourse theory and
its use as critical methodology to produce new readings of texts - Advanced work in preparing an analytical research paper with
potential for publication
Required
Texts
M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination
Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (abridged version)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Charlotte Bronte, Villette
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray
Course Requirements
Requirements for the course include
one oral report, a short analytical paper, and a final research paper of 20-25
pages.
JOAN
PETERS has published articles on literary genre and narrative in Studies in the Novel, The D. H. Lawrence Review, The South Carolina Review, Style and various essay
collections. Her book, Feminist Metafiction and the Evolution of
the British Novel, was published by the University of Florida in 2002. She is currently writing a book on
first-person narration in the post-modern
novel.