Approaches to Genre: The Novel

According to Friedrich Schlegel, the nineteenth-century writer, philosopher, and critic, “Novels are the Socratic dialogues of our times.” What is at stake in such a view of the novel? What is its relationship to subsequent theoretical formulations like Georg Lukács’ influential pronouncement that “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become the problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality?” Although we will begin with a pair of emblematic nineteenth-century novels, Balzac’s Pere Goriot and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, in which many of the problems and technical devices of the modern novel are first articulated and then subject to a radically sophisticated reconceptualization, I am not concerned to trace a historical trajectory. Instead, I want to devote the bulk of the semester, to a single work, Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, in which the formal concerns of the novel  — indeed, in which the very possibility of writing a novel – are at the core of a text conceived as a fully self-conscious thought-experiment. In Musil, the relationships between changing conceptions of language and desire, of the individual subject, and of the pressures of history, as these are figured in the possible rhetorics and structures of the novel, are explicitly thematized and will provide the central axes of our investigation. I am interested, as well, in pursuing these issues further as they are tested and clarified in a series of other high modernist novels, each of which saw itself as a kind of summa of the European novelistic tradition, including Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and as time allows and the interests of the seminar members guide us, I hope we will be able to explore, at least in part, a number of these other texts. Regular and active in-class participation and a willingness to engage in unusually complex and copious reading are the sole prerequisites for the course.

Required Texts:

Honoré de BALZAC, Pere Goriot (Paris: Folio classique)

Honoré de BALZAC Pere Goriot (N.Y.: Signet Classics)

Gustave FLAUBERT, L’éducation sentimental (Paris: Folio classique)

Gustave FLAUBERT, Sentimental Education (N.Y.: Penguin Classics)

Robert MUSIL, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg: Rowholt); 2 vols.

Robert MUSIL, The Man Without Qualities (New York: Vintage ) 2 vols.