Studies in the Novel (413-0-20)
Topic
Tours of Babel, Systems Fictions, and Theories of
Instructors
William N West
Meeting Info
University Hall 418: Thurs 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Near the turn of the millennium, an astute reader labeled a mixed bag of books as "systems fictions" or "network narratives." These works—DeLillo's Underworld, Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Silko's Almanac of the Dead, and others—assumed the multiple, shifting viewpoints of huge varieties of characters on dizzyingly ramifying plots; dashed across vast ranges of time and space; and experimented formally, structurally, and stylistically, not always successfully, addressing themselves to the interdependent complexities of the world by imitating as well as representing them. A wider sweep places such works not as a peculiar style of the millennium, but as recurring features of literary history, from the premodern romance traditions of Spenser's Faerie Queene to modernist collages like Joyce's Ulysses to post-millennial works like Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Catton's The Luminaries, or Yanagihara's To Paradise. These works have in common a reluctance to reduce the world to the scale of a single human consciousness, aiming instead at rendering its other patterns. Collectively they ask, What does literature know that cannot be known in other ways? What does it represent that cannot otherwise be represented? In this seminar we will explore the premises and efforts of several such texts, following their signal in dislocating their form of writing to earlier historical moments.
Evaluation Method
Presentations; final paper with preliminary proposal and outline.
Class Materials (Required)
Texts may include: Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49; Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, Catton, The Luminaries; and selections from Spenser, The Faerie Queene; Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Joyce, Ulysses; De Lillo, Underworld; Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land
Texts will be available at: Norris, or I will supply information for ordering books by mail.