ENG 333 - Studies in Fiction

Description and Narration
This course will study the relations between description and narration in the novel. We will explore how literary description is constituted, the variety of purposes it has, and how those purposes might sustain, diverge from or complicate the narrative’s project. Our inquiry will be guided by three basic questions. In what ways might one usefully catalog the relations between description’s special interests in specific moments, landscapes, objects, characters and the plot’s overarching teleology? How does the relation between description and narration illuminate a novel’s representation of material culture, its place in a literary tradition, or its role as a carrier of ideology? How do the preferred media or sensorial technologies of a particular period influence the description and narration of that period? For purposes of rudimentary historical survey, the course opens with bookend texts, one from the ancient, one from the contemporary, and one from the medieval period. For purposes of closer study, we will spend most of the semester reading naturalist, realist, and modernist novels, including texts by Chretien de Troyes, Melville, Flaubert, Hardy, Zola, Woolf, Jesmyn Ward, and Sara Baume.

James Joyce
In 2022, the hundredth-anniversary year of the publication of Ulysses, critics and scholars have repeatedly hailed James Joyce as the most influential and important fiction writer of the twentieth century, noting that he effectively rewrote the configurations and capabilities of the short story, novel, and epic. Over the track of his career, Joyce’s fiction progressed from its roots in literary naturalism to more complex modernist forms, exhibiting his uncanny ability to master and also invent different rhetorical discourses. This course tracks the full range of this development, from his earliest fictions in Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man all the way through brief selections from his last and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake; we will focus particular attention on the entirety of Ulysses. We will pay attention as well to critical, biographical, and historical contexts for Joyce’s work.

Jane Austen
In this course we will read Jane Austen’s six completed novels, selections from her juvenilia and unfinished works, and prose by important contemporaries including Ann Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, and Mary Wollstonecraft. We will frame our discussions with critical and historical studies addressing the following topics among others: character, narration, and free indirect discourse; novelistic genre, including the Bildungsroman, or novel of formation; the historical emergence of the companionate marriage model; the geography of the novel at the turn of the 19^th century and the social role of the English country house; Austen’s relation to empire and English politics c.1800; social class and stratification; economics and everyday life.

The Literary Imagination and the Working Hand
American authors have conceived of the writer’s work in ambivalent terms: sometimes as drudgery for pay, sometimes as artisanal craft, and sometimes as a sign of the intellect’s accession to a realm of freedom and truth. In 19th and 20th century American literature, this ambivalence about the writer’s place in society is manifest in the literary text as a range of attitudes that moves from empathy with the working classes to alienation from their condition. In the exploration of five stylistically dense and idiosyncratic texts, the project of this course is to compare the material and social labor performed by the characters to the imaginative, rhetorical work done by its narrator(s). Our close readings will be grounded in the following questions. Are characters and narrators ontological equals or do they occupy different positions in an allegorical hierarchy? Are the text’s representations of material labor and the work of the literary imagination congruent or in conflict with one another? How prominently and to what purpose does a character’s work figure in the narrator’s consciousness of his or her own project? When and why is a character’s work echoed in the narrative’s style (i.e. the redundant nature of character’s work is represented by verbal repetition in the text)? Finally, how does the represented status of material, ethical, and artistic work contribute to the text’s argument about which values are either ideally or distinctly American? Primary texts include Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: A Romance, Melville’s Billy Budd and The Piazza Tales, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Willa Cather’s, My Antonia, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives.

Queer Modernist Fiction
The advent of literary modernism in the Anglophone world, with its emphasis on new forms for cultural expression, coincided with the reconception of same-sex desire in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a new array of sexual identities became articulated and substantiated in different forms of medical, legal, and political discourse. This course studies the ways in which fictional works in primarily the United Kingdom and the United States in the modernist period (roughly 1900-1960) negotiate expressions of queerness before the time of the Stonewall riots. We will study important fictions by authors such as E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Claude McKay, Christopher Isherwood, Patricia Highsmith, Han Suyin, and James Baldwin. Alongside these works we will also read some relevant critical and theoretical work in queer studies (by figures such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, Michael Warner, and Heather Love), although the emphasis of the course will be mostly on the fiction.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): Sophomore standing and two ENG courses at the 200 level or higher
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 4 times for credit if different topics.
Notes:

Not all topics offered every year.
Review schedule of classes for availability.
Review specific descriptions for applicability to department requirements.
Jane Austen: 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).