11:15a-12:05p MWF (30) 3 cr

One of the activities that we take for granted is reading long narratives about the lives of characters who don't exist, but who move through a world that we recognize as being something like the world that we live in. That is to say, we read novels. The novel as a form (at least in England) was more or less "invented" in the eighteenth century, but it is often said that the novel in turn "invented" or "constructed" the culture in which it arises: it shapes its readers' notions of what it means to have a self, or to be a man or a woman, or to fall in love, or to be a citizen of a commercial nation like Great Britain. Moreover, it could be argued that these novels also "invented" us: our own most deeply held beliefs are shaped by this "Early Modern" culture which is the immediate forerunner of our own. To read them then is to reflect on our own notions of private experience, of courtship, and of social class. Finally, since these novels were read and admired by Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce (among others), it could be said that reading these novels helps in understanding the great novelists of the nineteenth century and twentieth-century.

I haven't made final choices yet (and I am open to suggestions from students who are interested in taking the course–contact me at Rosenblu@indiana.edu), but we will probably be reading the following narratives: Aphra Behn's Oroonoko ; Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe ; excerpts from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (the first novel to take rape seriously); Henry Fielding's Tom Jones ; Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy ; Fanny Burney's Evelina ; and an early novel of Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey .

This course also will introduce students to some of the classic general treatments of the novel (by Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, M. Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and Wayne Booth) as well as recent responses to Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (by John Bender, Nancy Armstrong, J. Paul Hunter, Margaret Doody, William Warner Beatty, and Terry Eagleton). Whenever the reading gets heavy, I will try to allow as much extra reading time as I can. I will ask students to prepare brief responses to the readings, take a midterm and a final, and write two (or three) short critical essays.