Episodes in Literary Cultures

Why do people write long novels, and why do people read them? We will look for answers in three different places: in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and in selections from Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time. Eliot and Dostoevsky had different ambitions as novelists. Middlemarch and The Idiot were written around the same time, but they come from different traditions (English and Russian) and have astonishingly different aims. Our goal will be to figure out what Eliot and Dostoevsky were using novel-writing to do, and why their undertakings required such length. Proust loved the novels of Eliot and Dostoevsky. He named The Idiot the most beautiful novel he ever read. When he wrote his own novel, he outdid both Eliot and Dostoevsky in length.

We will only be able to read selections from his seven-volume novel within the confines of this course, but we will read enough to see how he took the ambitions of earlier novelists like Eliot and Dostoevsky and went in new directions with them. There are reasons why novels are long, but, as we will discover, they aren’t always the same reasons. For these three writers, but in very different ways, a novel becomes an instrument for studying and for experiencing what it means to exist in the world and in time. The three novels we will be reading are now thought of as among the most inventive, challenging, and influential ones ever written. By the end of the semester, we should be experienced enough readers to ask why reading long novels is important and how it can help make different aspects of the world we live in intelligible to us. We should be well equipped to judge how this kind of immersive reading experience can transform our ability to see the world around us.

Books:

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Guermantes Way (excerpts)