WGSS 328 - Narrating Other Minds: Austen, Eliot, Woolf

Institution:

Williams College

Subject:

Women's, Gender & Sexuality

Description:

At roughly fifty-year intervals, Britain produced three brilliant female novelists-- Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf-- who would each become renowned, in her own way, for her ability to combine minutely detailed social observation with a rich depiction of the inner lives of her characters. This course will examine some of their major fiction-- with an emphasis on Austen and Eliot-- in the context of recent critical debate about the nature and implications of their narrative methods for representing the consciousnesses of characters, and of the authorial narrative voices that mediate among them. Questions to be considered: how is our understanding of novelistic characters and consciousness shaped by our real-life experience in interpreting the thoughts and character of others, and vice versa? Do "omniscient" narrators lay claim to a privileged kind of knowing presumed to be unavailable either to their character or to readers, or are they modelling humanly available interpretive stances toward a world of others? Why does "free indirect discourse"-- which blurs the distinction between the consciousness of narrator and character-- feature so prominently in the work of all three? Possible texts include Austen's Emma and Persuasion, Eliot''s Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda, and The Lifted Veil, and Woolf's The Waves.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

A 100-level English course, or a score of 5 on the Advanced Placement examination in English Literature or a 6 or 7 on the International Baccalaureate

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Seminar

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.williams.edu

Phone Number:

(413) 597-3131

Regional Accreditation:

New England Association of Schools and Colleges

Calendar System:

Four-one-four plan

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