ENGL 242 B: Reading Prose Fiction

ENGL242B --  Au 2019 Reading Prose Fiction

This class will read landmarks of prose fiction. We’ll follow the historical succession of styles and formal inventions in Western literary history, from Boccaccio to Beckett, and explore the particular uses of fiction in a variety of genres (short stories and tales, novels, satire, allegory, etc.), with special emphasis on language and style. You’ll be expected to read an average of 120-150 pages per week.

Reading List (editions I’ve ordered at the U Bookstore):

Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style. New Directions. (You can use Kindle if you must save a few dollars but make sure your Kindle edition has the artwork of the book! If not, the Kindle is a swindle.)

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron. McWilliam translation (Penguin). The Decameron is a big book, and we’ll read only a representative selection from its one hundred stories, but it’s one of humanity’s greatest books and every civilized person must own a copy. Penguins are inexpensive. (If you already own a copy of the Waldman (Oxford) or the Rohburn (Norton) translation you can use it; most online/electronic versions of the stories are dated, incomplete, and inferior.)

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Geoffrey Wall tr., (Penguin). There are many translations and they are not equal: Wall’s is one of the better ones.

James Joyce, A Porttrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Dover or any paperback).

 Aleksandr Solzhenutsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (any edn.; Willett’s is the best).

 George Orwell, Animal Farm. Signet.

Procedures, Requirements, Grading:

Please be aware that this class will involve a lot of reading—and writing. You will be quizzed on every individual work so attendance is not just mandatory but essential. Your grade will be the sum of four components: 1/ Several short take-home/in-class essays (total of two grade units); 2/ reading journal (one grade unit); 3/ quizzes and attendance (one grade unit). To get a passing grade you must get at least a minimal grade in each of the four components (e.g., failure to deliver one of the short essays will mean the loss of more than one grade unit).

*Reading Journal: your reading journal must contain your own observations, reflections, and questions as you read the primary texts, responses to tasks I’ve assigned in class, and notes from critical sources—but not lecture notes. (You can include your own discussions of or elaborations on things you have heard in class from me or any other participant.) I’ll expect you to write regularly—at least one page per meeting or a total of at least 20 standard pages (double space). I will periodically—and randomly—check your reading journals so you must have them in class all the time.

Tentative Schedule of Meetings

Required/optional stories from Boccaccio’s Decameron (we don’t have time for the whole book so we’ll read selected stories only; the list below is preliminary: there may be a few changes; for quick reference use the numbers in the first column, i.e., 1.1 = Day One, First Story; the titles in the fourth column are my short-hand references, not Boccaccio’s titles):