Arthur Efron
THEORY OF THE NOVEL
Thursdays 3:30 to 6:10
The novel, D. H. Lawrence, wrote, is "the one bright book of life," and "the greatest form of human inter-relatedness" ever discovered. I am going to try to elaborate on this vision. This course will work to develop a theory of the novel for the present that can have practical benefits for students, teachers, and people who are not in academic life. We will read four very different novels in relation to major theories: Don Quixote Part One, Wuthering Heights, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and the recently published novel by Charles Baxter, nominated for the National Book Award, The Feast of Love. I will use as a text Essentials of the Theory of Fiction (Duke University Press, 1996), especially its selections from Henry James, M. M. Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, Wayne Booth, William H. Gass, Gerard Genette, Gerald Prince, George Levine ("Realism Reconsidered"), Tzetan Todorov, John Barth, Henry Lewis Gates, Jr., Peter Brooks, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Barbara Foley, Joanne S. Fry (on "a Feminist Poetics for the Novel"), and Linda Hutcheon.
We will back these up with some longer major texts on the novel. We will read Lawrence's 5 short essays on the novel, Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster, and Virginia Woolf's "Modern Fiction" and her long but neglected essay, "Phases of Fiction." I will assign statements on the novel by living novelists, such as those by Nadine Gordimer and Milan Kundera, because they seem to lead into a world of novel readership that no doubt is not high-falutin' enough for the professional scholar, but is about why people actually read. (Yes, I know: there are professional scholars who are among these "people," but if you follow them around and hear what they say informally, about novels they like, you will often hear much more naive statements than they would ordinarily admit to).
We will also have at least a look back at what earlier novelists have had to say: Fielding's preface to Joseph Andrews, for instance, is about due, and so is the now-forgotten opposition to the novel, represented perhaps by Samuel Johnson's essay, "On Modern Fiction."
Modestly, I will include in this company my two published essays on theory of the novel, and talk about my third one, in progress. The course will give me a chance to see if my own book on Don Quixote, published 30 years ago, should be retired from its quest, and if my essay on Wuthering Heights and the sexual body can still rouse any interest. I also want to introduce some small part of my new booklength manuscript on Hardy's Tess and the aesthetics of experience, as developed by John Dewey. From Dewey's democratic perspective, we should also be able to understand why some not very polished novels such as the Harry Potter series become so important in the imaginations of young readers who might go on to become readers of the difficult "greats."
Generally, I will resist (but not dismiss) the notions that there is no such genre as the novel, that the novel is dead, or that it can be reduced to "writing," "power," "the market," "bourgeois culture," "the body" or "narrativity." We will try to understand why it is that the modern novel, developed largely in the Western world, is having so many rebirths in the rest of the world today. (We might ask, for example, What will China gain now that it is allowing novels to be published, after having stifled novel production for decades?) I will defend the concept of character, with all of its culturally privileged, interior knowledge of the human being in society, which, as E.M. Forster knew, has been hard-won through the creative struggles of the great novelists.
Term paper, 15-35 pages, on a novel to be chosen from a long and varied list of novels that I will distribute, and whatever theory you think would best bring out its value. You will be asked to lead discussion at least once in the seminar, and to turn in several short (as short as half a page) interim comments on the readings and discussions. Discussion will be fostered, cajoled, encouraged, and risked.