The Modern Period

The Hungarian Marxist thinker Georg Lukács argues in his influential The Theory of the Novel (1920) that the outward form of the novel is essentially biographical. That is, the novel explores a problem symbolized by the story of a character’s life.  Ian Watt, a thinker of a very different political and aesthetic temperament than Lukács, says in his equally seminal The Rise of the Novel (1957) that novels are obligated to convince their readers of the individuality of their characters. Most theorists and historians of the novel would concur with Lukács and Watt on the centrality of the individual to the development of the novel. But what if a novel orders its narrative universe with something other than a central figure whose experiences provide the organic limits to the story? What if in complicating the seeming naturalness of the biographical form a novel manages to perform a critique of the historical association between the “rise” of the novel as a literary mode and the universalization of the discourses of the individual that sustained the emergence and global spread of capitalist modernity? This course addresses these questions through careful readings of British, U.S., and Latin American novels. We will also read significant theoretical works on the novel.

Possible readings include: William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom!, José María Arguedas Yawar Fiesta, Georg Lukács The Theory of the Novel, Nancy Armstrong How Novels Think, Alex Woloch The One vs. the Many, and Charles Taylor Sources of the Self.