This is just to let you know we’ve added another section of ENGL 247, The British Novel, a popular Gen Ed course (Literature and the Arts; Western Comparative Culture).  Please let your students know this course is available if you get a chance.  Thanks!

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ENGL 247, Section S
THE BRITISH NOVEL
TR 2:00-3:15

This course traces the development of the British novel from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the present day.  The six novels we will discuss include some of the most influential literary works of all times, which continue to compel and fascinate readers, as is evidenced by their seemingly endless incarnations in films, BBC miniseries, sequels, and (even) zombie offshoots.  They include realistic renderings of the Cinderella story, archetypal narratives about every man being an island unto himself, modernist fantasies about changing gender and time at will, and postmodernist satires about our fallen human condition.  The novel, Ian Watt argued in his classic study, The Rise of the Novel, is a genre that, by definition, dedicates itself to representing individuals, often at odds with their societies.  It came onto the literary scene fairly late in the day because only in modernity do individuals (rather than their communities or God) really matter as bearers of agency or as centers of consciousness, desire, and will.  We will ask whether Watt’s thesis really holds, as well as questions like the following: How do considerations of gender, class, race, and nationality inform various novelists’ understandings of who counts as an individual?  In what kinds of societies, if any, do our fictional protagonists seek membership?  Do these exclude anyone, and if so, why?  We will pay special attention to the treatment of gender in the works we read since women acquired a new importance in the novel, as both shapers and subjects of the new genre.  We will consider how fiction represents the relationship between the sexes and how it imagines female agency.

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