ENGL 329 A: Rise of the English Novel

English 329 - Spring 2019

            The novel has been the dominant genre in English and world literature for more than three centuries. Henry James called it “the most independent, most elastic, most prodigious of literary forms.” For R. P. Blackmur, the novel gives “theoretical form to life.” “European society,” says philosopher E. M. Cioran, “is the society of the novel. Europeans are the children of the novel.” How did the novel rise to such preeminence? This course will explore the rise of the English novel through Don Quixote by Cervantes and Tristram Shandy by Sterne, two of the great early novels, possibly the greatest ever. We’ll also look at excerpts from Bunyan, Defoe, Richardson and others. Discussions will focus on the poetics of the novel as a literary genre and the problems associated with its emergence in England. We’ll study the connections between empiricism, individualism, and the rise of middle-class values and mentality: the English novel responded to those broad social currents with narratives modeling human behavior and destiny, virtue and vice, curiosity and quirkiness. We’ll also explore the formal connections between the novel and other genres (epic, history, satire), and the role of humor and parody in the emergence of the novel. Our main objective is to read the primary texts, grasp the large literary issues, and learn the critical vocabulary related to the genre of the novel. Successful completion of the course will enable you to understand better the subsequent history of the novel, the rise of realism, and how the unfinished form of the novel encourages aesthetic experimentation. 329 is an upper-level English course with a substantial reading load. (The three novels (recent Penguin edns), critical introductions included, add up to more than 2000 pages; the 329 Files on Canvas add another 200 pages, i.e., the reading total is more than 2,000 pages of non-trivial reading. If you start from scratch you’d have to read more than 250 pages per week. It’s doable but it takes time.)

            Requirements and grading:  reading log, brief research tasks, quizzes, participation, attendance (25% of your course grade), in-class final (25%), and two short essays (25% each). A blueprint for the reading log can be found at the end of this document. If your reading log is diligent and perceptive I may waive the first short essay. The in-class final will contain review questions related to the discussions in class, and recognition questions (you’ll have to identify the place and purpose of a few short passages from the works we’ve read). Failure to hand in an essay or missing the final will result in a very severe downgrade (more than 25% of the final grade or 1 grade unit).

            Copies of the novels will be available at the UBookstore. (If you already own a different edition you can use it.) All three novels are large and are essentially related to the book form so electronic editions on handheld devices won’t do: you need to hold the real paper-and-ink thing in your hands. 329 Canvas Files will be available at the beginning of the quarter.

            Please read carefully the tentative/!/ schedule below. Dates and topics may change as we progress but the order of readings will be the same. Don Quixote, Joseph Andrews, and Tristram Shandy must be read in their entirety (I may allow you to skip some of TS but not much!). I can’t give you exact page numbers because people will be using different editions. NB:  a 600-page novel (Tristram Shandy) may not seem a big task numerically but that’s 600 pages of eighteenth-century English, and for many of you it will be a slow read, slower than a Victorian novel, much slower than anything contemporary. (Don Quixote is longer but most of you will be reading a translation in contemporary English translation, and that will go much faster.) The “excerpts” (from The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, and Gargantua and Pantagruel range from a couple to a few dozen pages each. Time management is of the essence. The books--and excerpts--we’ll read are absolutely worth reading in their entirety. We have only ten weeks to cover all that magnificent material, and one of our important jobs is to learn HOW to read those authors. (We’ll be dealing with unsurpassed masterpieces of prose fiction, and I’m sure that this won’t be your first and only contact with them: the books we cover as fragments you can read in their entirety on your own.)

Tentative Schedule

*Tasks = reading you have to do to prepare for the next meeting or meetings.

** Defoe, Robinson Crusoe:

                Read Chapters I and V at Gutenberg.org.  (Please keep in mind that the original is unchaptered! If you own a good edition read the first 10-12 pages, then skip to the first 10 pages of Robinson’s Journal.) Our discussion will include a couple of later passages but I’ll give you Xerox copies of those. (Extra/optional: If you have a little extra time (the book is worth it) read through Robinson’s statement “I now come to a new Scene of my Life” (namely, his surprise at finding “the print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore”) which is about halfway through.)

***Richardson, Pamela:

                http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6124/6124-h/6124-h.htm

                Read I-XV (the first 20 pages or so), to get the flavor of the book. Then read Letter XXV and the first few journal entries (they start after Letter XXXII).