Senior Seminar

In Georg Lukács’s seminal 1936 essay “Narrate or Describe?” he identified narration and description as distinctive modes of the novel, each appropriate to a different form of society under a different period of capitalism. Although Lukács was not the first to distinguish between narration and description, his essay was decisive in entrenching this opposition and, moreover, in denigrating the latter: whereas narration is the dramatic mode of writers and characters who are active participants, description is the tedious mode of passive observers.

Departing from Lukács, this course will reexamine the question “narrate or describe?” reappraising the features and potentials of its neglected term. We will look at a range of critical texts (Auerbach, Genette, Jameson, Franco Moretti, Mieke Bal), testing their claims against a selection of realist, naturalist, and modernist novels spanning the 19th to early 20th centuries (e.g. Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Conrad, Musil). Our questions will include: what are the characteristics of narration and description and why have they so often been opposed in theories of the novel? How can we understand shifts in literary conventions in relation to wider social and economic changes? What assumptions about knowledge and value are embedded in different descriptive frameworks? In addition, we will also consider theories and histories of description in other fields, notably art history and history of science. What do we do when we describe an image in words? How did the advent of photography and later cinema change the role of description in novels? What is the relation of description to empirical observation, and how have ideas about scientific observation also changed over time?