Reading Against the Glass (2011)

Reading Against the Glass: Adventures in the Novel from Cervantes to Marquez

 Spring 2011

Course Description

This course aims to construct an alternate history of the British novel under the sign of Don Quixote. Standard accounts of the “rise of the novel” in English often trace its development in parallel with certain philosophical and economic trends that culminate in the nineteenth-century with the middle class reading public; this narrative is inevitably tied to an aesthetic of realism whose leading advocates and practitioners constitute the canon of the English novel from Defoe and Richardson to Eliot and James via Austen. There is, however, an equally compelling—at times far more popular—countertradition that defines itself precisely though its resistance to the strictures of realism; it is a tradition that embraces the principle of fictionality in its complex dialectic with the “real.”

The novel has always been (and remains) an open-ended form, one whose origins are as multifarious as its drive to consume all other forms is capacious. One way to deepen our appreciation for the possibilities of narrative representation is to explore other branches of its genealogy, turning from France to the Mediterranean South: the land not of realism but romance. Cervantes’s Don Quixote exerts a renewed and increasingly powerful influence on British writers starting in the eighteenth century, and we will examine three of the novelistic genres in which the shadow of the Don is particularly pronounced: comedy, romance, and the eccentric or parodic anti-novel. Authors, drawn primarily from the period 1760-1870, will include Sterne, Scott, Dickens and Carroll. This trajectory will be framed by the fantastic tales of Borges and the magical realism of Marquez, two interrelated movements in twentieth-century Spanish literature that are also deeply informed by and indebted to Cervantes and the romance tradition he spawned in English; together, they make a powerful case that the unreal and improbable can often be more profoundly “real” than bare reality.

Our approach will emphasize the strategies and practices novels deploy to stage their dialectical engagement with and resistance to realism, especially in terms of narrative structure and characterization. Consequently, we will undertake our own voyage through twentieth-century criticism and theory of the novel, touching on many of the milestones in contemporary debates about the limits of realism and the power of non-realistic representation, fictionality, and romance. Throughout the course, we will be concerned with basic questions about how novels written under fundamentally different parameters from the ones we are now accustomed to should be (and were) read, how genre and mode both constrain and liberate the possibilities of narrative, and how criteria of literary value are determined (and contested) in literary history. Depending on student interest, potential secondary readings may include selections from: Mikhail Bakhtin, Viktor Shklovsky, Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, Hayden White, Fredric Jameson, D.A. Miller, Michael McKeon, Susan Stewart, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Ian Duncan, Catherine Gallagher, Deidre Lynch, Alex Woloch, and Franco Moretti.