Reading & Composition

What are the different binary oppositions that terms like representation and fiction tend to set up and how do different texts, and the novel in particular attempt to free our analytical thinking from oppositions like fiction vs. non-fiction and art vs. reality? How might we begin to understand the relationship between language and the world without seeing these respective spaces as being easily juxtaposed or spaces that are easily set apart? In this course, we wish to expand our understanding of the concept of fiction beyond the idea of stories about the world, plots with easily recognizable parts, as well as stories that make complete sense. How can we think about narrative beyond the idea of a story? In this course we will learn that the creative productions of fictional art are oftentimes quite vast in their scope while also seeing why it is difficult to set clear boundaries for what a literary text is about. We also hope to explore how literary form shifts dramatically over time. Beginning with texts in antiquity and the medieval period, this course will examine debates over concepts like mimesis, the transition from epic narrative into other literary forms, vernacular language, meta-narrative, and in particular the relationship between fictional language and the novel form, with an emphasis on novels written in the 20thcentury.

Early in the course we hope to gain familiarity with different viewpoints on concepts like mimesis, plot, narrative temporality, verbal poetical structure, and the problem of referentiality. We will also examine throughout the course novelistic techniques such as characterization, narrative unreliability, and represented speech and thought. Here we will also consider the relationship between narrative and the representation of time, the relationship between fiction and epistemology, while examining historical shifts in the way in which the reader approaches narrative art epistemologically in the 20th century, with a particular focus later in the course on developments in the novel form during the 1920’s.

Course texts:

Aristotle, Poetics

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

James Joyce, Ulysses

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Franz Kafka, The Trial