English 365: Fiction
Instructor: Nandini Chandra
nc8@hawaii.edu
Office Hours: by appointment, on Zoom
Format: Online Asynchronous
High On Style: Self-Conscious Modernist Prose
Modernity produces the unspeakable. Style is an oblique way of responding to and articulating this unspeakable. The aim of this course is to understand and appreciate the modernist absorption in style as a quasi end in itself; style as both the answer and the question. This endeavor takes us deep into various fictional forms of the twentieth century, especially the novel, while also charting modernism’s relationship to the narrative realism of the 19th century. We examine a range of different prose styles such as the ornamental, the gothic, the elliptical, the whimsical, the bare, the abstract, the aphoristic, montage etc. to understand the relationship between ornament and essence, form and content. While fragmentary forms like prose poetry often elide narrative, narrative fiction of the twentieth century often flirts with elisions, and strikingly distinct styles often speak to each other in unexpected ways as they negotiate the competing demands of economy and exactitude, medium and message.
Readings (Mostly available as pdf):
Marcel Proust, “On Reading” (1905-6)
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat” (1843), pdf. (1-14)
Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street” (1928), pdf. (61-94)
G. K. Chesterton, “The Blue Cross” (1910), pdf. (5-25)
Anaïs Nin, The Dairy of Anaïs Nin: 1931-34, Volume I (1966), (191-222)
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)
Muriel Spark, “The Portobello Road” (1958), pdf. (164-189)
Samuel Beckett, “Fizzles 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8” (1972-75), pdf. (224-246)
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (1951) pdf. (42-63)
Chris Marker, Sans Soleil (1983), 86 minutes
Student Learning Objectives:
- Students will work toward a comprehensive understanding of style across a range of twentieth century-texts
- Students will learn to understand the constitutive relationship between narrative prose and the experience of time.
- Students will learn to map style in literary modernism through a comparison with style in modernist fashion and architecture.
Assignments: Students will participate in online discussions, quizzes, and short writing assignments.