Reading Against the Glass: Adventures in the Novel from Cervantes to Rushdie
Spring 2012
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 1760-1850, will include Sterne, Scott, Hogg, de Quincey and Dickens. This trajectory will be framed by the fantastic tales of Borges and the magical realism of Rushdie, two interrelated movements in twentieth-century cosmopolitan 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” or “true” 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, characterization, and metafictionality. Consequently, we will undertake our own voyage through a series of milestones in contemporary theoretical debates in novel studies about the limits of realism and the power of non-realistic representation, fictionality, and romance. After spring break, we will focus on tracing the hidden networks around such concepts as eccentricity and irony that connect narrative and character with historical stylistics (baroque, postmodern) and the politics of aesthetics (deconstructive and postcolonial critique). 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 constrains and liberates the possibilities of narrative, and how criteria of literary value are determined (and contested) in global literary history. Secondary readings will include selections from: Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, James Clifford, Paul de Man, Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sarduy, D.A. Miller, J. Hillis Miller, Linda Hutcheon, Michael McKeon, Ian Duncan, Catherine Gallagher, Deidre Lynch, Alex Woloch, Bruce Robbins, Wendy Faris, Katie Trumpener, and Pascale Casanova.
This year’s course will also be supplemented by an exploration of non-realist techniques in the medium of film. Novel readings may be paired, creatively, with challenging masterpieces by Wiene, Renoir, Welles, Kurosawa, Ophüls, Resnais, Godard, Altman, Herzog, Wong, Ruiz, Sukorov, Jonze, and Malick.