COMP 335
Manners, Modernity, and the Novel Spring 2014
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ENGL 335
This is not the current course catalog

Class Details

The novel, particularly in some of its nineteenth-century British iterations, has long been nearly obsessed with taste and good form, ceaselessly preoccupied with the nicer aspects of social life and etiquette. Historians of the “rise of the novel,” the period when novels took shape as Britain’s signal cultural form, have allied that development with the civilizing process itself, as if novels were what both keep us from killing each other at the dinner table, and from being so uncouth as to use a fish fork to eat our salad. What’s more, manners are at the heart of many of the novel’s own central concern, and those concerns are some of the most pressing ones of modernity: the nature of social authority amidst increasingly fluid notions of class, the role of taste in the discourse of aesthetics, and the relation of civilization to the discontents it engenders (as Freud famously put it). This course will think about the 19th and early-20th-century novel’s at times manic interest in good social form, using this as a way of thinking about the novel’s own formal development and cultural status, its increasingly self-conscious sense of itself as no longer simply low entertainment, but something more refined as it enters the 20th century. We will read novels alongside discourses of style and taste, ranging from the rise of etiquette books, to philosophical writing on aesthetics, ethics, and sociological theories of taste as an engine of social distinction. This class also will try to see how early theories of the novel are themselves grounded in social form, asking how manners in the novel became a manner of speaking about the novel, with the idiom of tact and well-heeled form shaping the emergence of the professional study of the novel from the early in the 20th century onward. We will ask how something seemingly as quaint as good manners becomes a means of registering, and contending with, the vicissitudes of modernity in fiction, from the perfection of social form in Oscar Wilde to the calculated reticence of Henry James. Finally, we will turn to a contemporary novel of manners to see what remains so productive, terrifying, and so novelistic, about the compulsion to keep up appearances. Novelists likely to include Jane Austen, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Bret Easton Ellis or Edward St. Aubyn. Theorists will include Pierre Bourdieu, Norbert Elias, Theodor Adorno, and Erving Goffman among others.
The Class: Format: tutorial
Limit: 10
Expected: 10
Class#: 3910
Grading: OPG
Requirements/Evaluation: weekly papers and discussion
Extra Info: may not be taken on a pass/fail basis
Prerequisites: a 300 level ENGL Class
Enrollment Preferences: English majors
Distributions: Division I Writing Skills
Notes: This course is cross-listed and the prefixes carry the following divisional credit:
ENGL 335 Division I COMP 335 Division I
Attributes: ENGL Criticism Courses
ENGL Literary Histories B

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