ENGL 485-01, Senior Seminar: Studies in the Novel, Fall 2014

Abstract

This class will consider the novel as an artistic medium, with attention to several key concepts and problems, including realism, historicism, and postmodernism. In the first ten weeks of the term, we will study two significant works of fiction, Walter Scott’s Waverly (1814) and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004). Waverly was Scott’s first novel; he was known to that point as a poet, and he published Waverly anonymously. Its tremendous popularity spawned many imitators and shaped the taste of the English reading public for a generation. It also created a new sub-genre, which we now call the historical novel, and which had significant impact on the evolution of the novel in broader terms. Mitchell’s very recent book is in part a playful return to the concerns of the historical novel—indeed it opens with scenes set roughly during the time of Scott. But Mitchell’s book moves much more widely and in this way comments on the movement of the novel as a medium of literary expression. While reading these texts, we will consult major critical statements on the novel as a genre, focusing on the issues most relevant to these two texts. The purpose of this course is to guide and support you as you develop an independent statement of your own on a major work of fiction, reading a novel both within the history of the development of its genre and within the history of its time and place. The first eight weeks of the term are designed to immerse you in one of contemporary literary history’s most vigorous and fascinating disputes, i.e. the ongoing argument about why the novel emerged as a distinctive genre in the eighteenth century, why it attained such dominance in the nineteenth, and why it changed so much in the twentieth. Our critical and theoretical readings all ask versions of these questions, trying to understand the way that literary genres experience and register historical change. The focus of the class will shift gradually from common readings to individualized study, as each student brings these questions to bear in the reading of a particular novel.