ENGL 378 - The Novel in Theory and Practice

Institution:

University of Richmond

Subject:

Description:

Considers novels in the context of a variety of theoretical approaches, asking what theory can tell us about the novel and, equally important, what the novel can tell us about theory. Prerequisite(s): English 297 or 298 with a grade of C or better. Unit(s): 1 Additional Information: In this course students read a selection of novels that represent the historical development of the novel in its various manifestations since its emergence in the early eighteenth century as what would become the dominant modern literary genre. These include at least one novel (e.g., Jane Austen's Emma or Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights) that is linked to the romance, the narrative mode that was most characteristic of Western culture prior to the rise of the novel; at least one novel that represents the realism which strongly typified the genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which is still an important tendency in the novel (e.g., Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders or Charles Dickens's Great Expectations); at least one early twentieth-century modernist novel (e.g., Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse or Mrs. Dalloway); at least one example of postmodern fiction (e.g., Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, or perhaps a novel in the style called "magical realism" such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude); and perhaps a contemporary novel that is an amalgam of several of these novelistic modes, such as Ian McEwan's Atonement. Beyond attending to the different modes of fiction and to their historical development, students examine each of the novels from several of the theoretical perspectives that have been brought to bear on narrative fiction in recent decades, perspectives associated, for example, with Marxist theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and so on. Students attend to two larger questions as they progress through the course: What is a novel How should I read a novel

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.richmond.edu

Phone Number:

(804) 289-8000

Regional Accreditation:

Southern Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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