ENGL 379
Promiscuity and the Novel Fall 2013
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The novel is frequently described in terms of the “marriage plot,” but the form might better be seen as exploring multiple emotional and sexual partnerships. This course will examine fiction where serial entanglements are the norm in order to ask why the novel has been so interested in faithlessness. We’ll cover fiction from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in several genres: the sentimental novel, nineteenth-century realism, sci-fi, Latin American urban literature, and queer fiction. Questions to be explored: the historical mutations in the meanings and narrative function of promiscuity; its association with sexual minorities, women, working-class people and aristocrats; the relations between eroticism and commerce. Possible authors to be studied: Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Jane Austen, Émile Zola, James Baldwin, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Roberto Bolaño.
The Class: Format: seminar
Limit: 20
Expected: 20
Class#: 1842
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: students will write one mid-term paper (5-6 pages) and one longer research paper (8-10 pages)
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: ENGL majors
Distributions: Division I
Attributes: ENGL Literary Histories B

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