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This course explores six formally innovative works of fiction, written over the last 250 years: a novel with marbled pages, whose narrator argues with its readers; a novel in verse; a novel moving across times and consciousnesses; a novel in footnotes; a novel of descriptions, mathematically combined; a novel that twists together fiction and historical documents into a new kind of writing.
We’ll read six formally innovative novels written between the mid eighteenth century and the early twenty-first. Each work will be placed in its literary and social context, but the main aim of the course is to explore how these experimental fictions reconfigured the novel as a genre and transformed what it could represent.
Week 1. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67)
Week 2. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (1825–32), in one of many translations
Week 3. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Week 4. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
Week 5. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972), translated by William Weaver
Week 6. Daša Drndic, Trieste (2012), translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac
By the end of the course you should be able to:
- Understand the social and cultural situations, including modern and postmodern literary movements, within which each novel took shape
- Identify and interpret the style and form of individual works of fiction, in light of the history and theory of the novel as a genre
- Undertake further independent study of formally innovative literature, using methods and concepts gained in this course
Each class will consist of a short lecture followed by a seminar, including close readings of selected passages, discussion of the context of the works’ production, and collaborative work in smaller groups. You’ll also be invited to give short presentations on aspects of the texts that especially interest you. The tutor will send out brief preparation tasks for each session, to help guide your reading. Some of the novels are relatively long: key passages will be suggested in case you don’t have time to look at the whole book, but you’ll get more out of the course if you’re able to read each text in full. Your progress will be assessed through class discussion, small quizzes, and a few more creative exercises.
You’ll be expected to read each text in advance of the class. The tutor will send out brief preparation tasks for each session, to help guide your reading. The first three novels are out of copyright and are available to read online. If you prefer to have a physical copy, good editions (published by Penguin, Oxford World’s Classics, Vintage, etc) can be bought new or second hand, or borrowed from a library. You will need to buy or borrow the novels by Nabokov, Calvino, and Drndić. The tutor will send out a reading list before the first session, which will include suggestions for further reading and study, as well as suggestions for which translations to use for the novels not originally written in English.
Self-directed study: detailed reading lists with suggestions of additional literary and critical texts to look at are supplied by the tutor for each session. Further literature classes at the Mary Ward Centre or elsewhere.
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