ENG 205 - Introduction to Fiction

The American Short Story
This course introduces students to the techniques of analyzing narrative fiction with a focus on the American short story as it has developed over the last two centuries. By beginning with the contemporary short stories in a recent Best American Short Stories volume, we initiate questions about the trajectories of an American literary history of the short story; by ending with a focus on the Canadian writer Alice Munro, we question the boundaries of the “American” short story. We will analyze traditional and innovative narrative techniques in the short story, including point of view and focalization, literary economy, space, plot compression, the relation of narrative structure and temporality, and the range of styles manifested in the American short story (e.g., realism, naturalism, allegory, impressionism, experimentalism). Additionally, we will consider the diversity of American experience, and of American literary movements. Readings will be drawn from works by classic writers such as Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, and contemporary writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Díaz.

Decolonization and the Novel in Africa
Taking root during late colonialism, the novel emerged as a prominent genre in the shaping of postcolonial societies in Africa. In the wake of decolonization, African writers turned to the novel, reinventing the genre to imagine new individual and collective identities and assess the legacies left behind by the colonial past. This course will examine various novelistic responses to the sociopolitical changes in different parts of Africa during the late twentieth and the twenty-first century. In what ways did the novel become a catalyst for cultural transformation in postcolonial Africa? How did the novel become the privileged genre of decolonization? Starting with the critiques of colonialism in the early decolonial period, we will explore topics including narratives of modernity and tradition, the failures of the nation-state, critique of patriarchy and gender, migration, displacement, neocolonial formations, and the promises and pitfalls of globalization. Readings may include novels by Tayeb Salih, Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chimamanda Adichie, and Helon Habila. Theoretical readings may include writings of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, and Achille Mbembe, among others.

Detective Stories and Crime Fiction
Often derided as a “lower” form of storytelling, crime fiction has been for decades one of the most popular genres of literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Engaged with central questions of what constitutes illicit actions in civilized societies, and how they might be detected and policed, the form also crucially concerns itself with matters both epistemological and ontological (especially concerning hidden identities). This course examines the development of classic crime and detective fiction, starting in the nineteenth century with Edgar Allen Poe’s pathfinding C. Auguste Dupin stories, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (often called the first popular detective novel in English), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s wildly popular Sherlock Holmes stories. The course will then proceed through the so-called golden age of detective fiction in the United Kingdom and the rise of hard-boiled detective fiction in the United States (both of which coincided with the era of literary modernism). We will finish by looking at how in recent decades the genre’s codes have been rewritten, particularly in light of questions about identity politics with regards to established social orders. Primary texts will also include works by Dorothy L. Sayers, Raymond Chandler, Chester Himes, Patricia Highsmith, P. D. James, and China Miéville.

Memory, Desire, and the Modern Novel
T.S. Eliot begins his 1922 poem The Waste Land evoking the admixture of memory and desire, reflecting literary modernism’s preoccupations both with the subjective life and with time and historicity. This course will examine the ways in which fictions from roughly the first half of the twentieth century repeatedly return to questions of a remembrance of eros past, both in their thematic content and in their formal narrative complexities. Marcel Proust, the most influential literary explorer of these questions, will occupy a central position in our analysis, but we will also examine novels by transatlantic modern authors who may include Rebecca West, Willa Cather, Nella Larsen, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, and James Baldwin. There will be brief critical readings by Stephen Kern, Anne Carson, Sigmund Freud, René Girard, and Michel Foucault, among others.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Bildungsroman
Young man from the provinces moves to the big city; young woman takes a new job. The youthful protagonists of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, set out on journeys to seek their fortune and find their place in a society where, for the first time, social identity was not assumed to be identical with social rank and simply established at birth. The major novelists of the period depict a society fascinated with the idea of upward mobility, and return almost obsessively to narratives tracking the ways in which their protagonists react to a hierarchical but dynamic social structure and how they forge their identities within it. We will examine the multiple variations on this theme in works drawn from among the following: Sir Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy. In addition to works of fiction we will read a number of critical texts on linked topics including narrators and narrative structure, the function of novelistic character, the concept of realism, and the nature and history of literary genres. This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.

Tolkien and Lewis
The imaginative writings of the Oxford scholars J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis constitute some of the most widely read, most beloved, and most pervasively influential fiction of the twentieth century. The two friends shared drafts of their work and presided together over a group of like-minded writers and thinkers. Across all their varied writings-and especially in their construction of fictive worlds-Tolkien and Lewis both thought of themselves as effecting a resistance to the prevailing literary and cultural pieties of modernity. And yet the two men were also temperamentally quite different and often aesthetically in deep tension with one another. In this course, we will compare the ways Lewis and Tolkien deploy genre, character, diction, narrative voice, imagery, and other literary techniques in the construction of their various fantastic worlds. We will consider too, the ways in which both writers articulated their commitment to a Christian worldview (and their opposition to “the machine”) and how they both came to understand the power and purpose of mythology. We will also have occasion to think through together how Tolkien and Lewis reproduced certain problematic aspects of the racism and sexism of their culture and how these might affect our evaluation of their works. To all these ends, we will read a generous selection from their most important writings, including J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (in its entirety) and Smith of Wootton Major, his essay “On Fairy Stories,” and excerpts from his Silmarillion, as well as C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, his science-fiction novels Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, two volumes of his Chronicles of Narnia, and his late, possibly brilliant novel Till We Have Faces. We will preface our analysis of their fictions by reading important works that influenced them by George MacDonald and William Morris.

The Victorian Gothic
The Victorians prided themselves on their commitments to reason, taxonomy, order, and rectitude. The novel, however, which was their dominant cultural form, often concerned itself with the dark underside to their world, where concomitant fascinations with superstition, chaos, crime, and vice instead held sway. These gothic Victorian fictions-dominated particularly by the related forms of the sensation novel, the detective novel, and the imperial romance-will be the object of study for this course, which will examine major works by such potential authors as Emily and Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Bram Stoker as a means of understanding not simply Victorian culture but more generally the form of the novel. We will also read short critical and theoretical works in the study of narrative to accompany our readings in gothic fiction. This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.

The Victorian Novel of Family Life
During the Victorian period (1837-1901), the United Kingdom often turned to the idealized household as its model for social community, seeking in its nominal stability of roles (for husband and wife, parents and children, and employers and servants) organizing principles for the larger national culture. This paradigm turned out to be neither as stable nor as uniform as often proposed, however, and the exploration of family life by means of the novel-the most popular cultural form of the era-showed the fault lines in the model structure of the “happy home,” which echoed wider Victorian social problems regarding gender, class, sexuality, labor, inclusivity, and authority. This course looks at the Victorian novel through its characteristic focus on family life and its discontents, surveying works by famous practitioners who may include Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and/or Thomas Hardy. We will end the semester by reading Virginia Woolf’s 1927 To the Lighthouse, a modernist look backwards at the Victorian family. There will be short critical readings, primarily about the contexts and functions of the novel as a literary genre.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken 4 times for credit
Notes: Not all topics offered every year. Review schedule of classes for availability. Review descriptions for specific applicability to department requirements.

The Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Bildungsroman
This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.

The Victorian Gothic
This course applies toward the department’s pre-1900 requirement.
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).