Eighteenth- and 19th-Century Literature
The European Novel, 18th and 19th Century
In this course we will tell the story of European novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by beginning with two points of origin in the seventeenth century–Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves. Topics will include: the interplay between fiction and desire, truth-telling and mimesis, romance and realism; the evolution of novelistic form in relation to revolutionary history; the privileging of plots of adultery, surveillance, and policing; the role of gender in defining the genre and the concept of “character”; the representation of first-person experience through third-person narration. Readings will include: Cervantes, Don Quixote (excerpts); Lafayette, La Princesse de Clèves; Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereuses; Goethe, Elective Affinities; Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme; Flaubert, Madame Bovary; Tolstoy, Anna Karenina.
While students with appropriate linguistic training will be encouraged to read works in their original languages, all readings will be available in English.