English 535: Victorian Studies
Spring 2014
NOVEL WORLDS
Realism, Structuralism, Aesthetics
Descriptive, conservative, unimaginative, literary realism is often valued, and more often reviled, for its fealty to reality, its adherence to referentiality, its enslavement to the world. Such appraisals have been over-determined in literary criticism since Aristotle and in theories of the novel since Auerbach; this seminar practices reading otherwise. Studying the nineteenth-century novel, we will hypothesize that the worlds of the novel are irreducible to “our” world and that realism multiplies and defamiliarizes, rather than copies and reifies, realities. What does the realist novel make, and how does it underscore its making? Is realism an aesthetic? What ensues philosophically and politically from today’s hegemonic insistence that the novel is information, and on what grounds can such insistence be resisted? Can novel poetics be specified, or is the famed “formlessness” of the “genre without genre” a negation of aesthetic critique? How are the fates of structuralism entwined with the reputes of realism?
Schedule of Readings
15 January
worldmaking
Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds excerpt
Jean Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World, “Urbi et Orbi”
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, “Worlds and Relations”
Jonathan Culler, “The Most Interesting Thing in the World”
Catherine Gallagher, “The Rise of Fictionality”
Peng Cheah, “What is a World?”
(Visit: Caroline Levine, details TBD)
22 January
worlds of the novel
Georg Lukacs, Theory of the Novel (Part I, 1-93)
Culler, Structuralist Poetics, “Poetics of the Novel”
Culler, “Toward a Theory of Non Genre Literature”
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, title essay
29 January
worldworks: the grammar of the world interior
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Frances Ferguson “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form”
D.A. Miller The Secret of Style, “No One is Alone”
Alex Woloch, The One Versus The Many, “Narrative Assymmetry in P & P”
5 February
worldworks: realism
Lukacs, “Narrate or Describe”
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”
Fredric Jameson, “The Realist Floor Plan”
Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, “The Narrative Impulse,” “Realism and the Dissolution of Genre”
Moretti, The Way of the World, “The Bildungsroman as Symbolic Form” (3-14)
Jonathan Arac, Impure Worlds, “Rhetoric and Realism” (94-124)
12 Feb
worldworks: scale, system
big, big worlds
Thackeray, Vanity Fair
Caroline Levine and Mario Ortiz-Robles, Narrative Middles, Introduction
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, “Narrative and Social Space”; “Austen and Empire”
19 Feb
Vanity Fair concluded
Eleanor Courtemanche, The Invisible Hand, “Ripple Effects and the Fog of War”
Andrew Miller, “Vanity Fair through Plate Glass”
26 Feb
worldworks: scale, frame
teeny, tiny, envelope worlds
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Analysis of Myth”
Roland Barthes, “The Structural Analysis of Narratives”
J. Hillis Miller, “Repetition and the Uncanny”
5 March
worldworks: typicality, totality, temporality, and the prose of the world
Eric Auerbach, “On the Serious Imitation of the Everyday”
Michal Ginsburg, “The Prose of the World”
Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois, “Prose” (35-66); “Serious Century” (67-100)
Gallagher, “George Eliot, Immanent Victorian”; “Formalism and Time”
Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, “The Experiments of Time”
12 March
worldworks: the everyday
Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
Elizabeth Langland, “Society as Formal Protagonist”
D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, “The Novel as Usual”
19 March
worldworks: the double, the mesh, the urban
Our Mutual Friend
Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse and the Novel”
Julian Wolfreys, Writing London, “Dickensian Architextures”
26 March SPRING BREAK
2 April
Our Mutual Friend concluded
Ranciere, Politics and Aesthetics, “The Distribution of the Sensible”
Mario Ortiz-Robles, The Novel as Event “Dickens and the Secret”
9 April
world literacies: the way we read now
Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, “Introduction” and “Whole”
Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically”
Moretti, Distant Reading “Style, Inc: Reflections on 7000 Titles,” “Network Theory, Plot Analysis”
Nicholas Brown, “Close Reading and the Market”
16 April
worldworks: logics of worlds
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, “Series of Paradoxes; Dualities; Proposition; Sense”
Elizabeth Throesch, “Nonsense in the Fourth Dimension of Literature”
23 April
world building
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
David Spurr, Architecture and Modern Literature, “An End to Dwelling”
(optional: Kornbluh, “Obscure Forms: The Letter, The Law, and The Line in Hardy’s Social Geometry”)
30 April
world crumbling
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism, “The Swollen Third Person, or Realism after Realism”
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, “The Materialism of Henry James”