Freshman/Sophomore Seminar

One of the enduring appeals of novels is their ability to offer us access to other mind. Thus fictional characters can feel like close friends, and reading books can often be a practice in empathetic imagination, giving us the chance (at least for a few hundred pages) to walk in another’s shoes. But how do literary texts create the fiction of being inside someone’s consciousness? In this course we will investigate this problem by paying attention to novelistic techniques and literary history, while also examining how the mind has been imagined and understood by writers, philosophers, psychologists, and scientists.

Our focus will be on works of modernism (spanning the later nineteenth to the mid twentieth century), a literary movement characterized by an intense interest in the workings of consciousness. What is the role of memory, attention, and habit in creating a sense of self? What can we know about other people’s minds, and how do we know our own? How have the categories of “normal” and “abnormal” minds been constructed and defined, and how have they been applied to specific groups of people?

List of books:

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translator Lydia Davis, (Penguin, 2011)
James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist (Penguin)
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Mariner Books; 1st Harvest/HBJ ed edition, 1990)
Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, translator Lydia Davis (Penguin, 2004)
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (W. W. Norton, 1992, paperback)
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy and In the Labyrinth (Grove Press, 1994, paperback)