ENGL 240
What is a Novel?
Last Offered Fall 2018
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed COMP 239
This course is not offered in the current catalog

Class Details

What is a novel? Where did it come from? Why would anyone invent such a thing in the first place? This course is an introduction to the ways literary critics have attempted to give a genre as hard-to-pin down as the novel a theoretical framework. For a long time, nobody thought the novel needed a theory–too popular, too loose and baggy to be thought of as one thing. Today, novel theory is legion. To only name a few, one can find theories of the novel that identify themselves as formalist, psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, Marxist, historical, and post-colonial, as well as accounts that emphasize sexuality and gender, for example, or the novel’s trans-national development. We will move back and forth from the theory of the novel to its practice in order to see how the novel and its understanding have changed over the past 200 or so years. Novelists will come from the 19th and 20th centuries, likely Austen, Dickens, and Mieville. Theorists are likely to include Henry James, Benjamin, Lukacs, Barthes, Watt, McKeon, Jameson, Eve Sedgwick, Edward Said, Leo Bersani, and Franco Moretti.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 19
Expected: 19
Class#: 1677
Grading: no pass/fail option, no fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: four to five papers totaling about 20 pages; regular, substantial, and intensive participation in class
Prerequisites: a 100-level ENGL course, or a score of 5 on the AP English Literature exam, or a score of 6 or 7 on the Higher Level IB English exam
Enrollment Preferences: first- and second-year students, and English majors who have yet to take a Gateway course
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
COMP 239 Division I ENGL 240 Division I
Attributes: ENGL Criticism Courses
ENGL 200-level Gateway Courses
ENGL Literary Histories B

Class Grid

Updated 9:13 am

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