THE AGE OF THE NOVEL

What does the novel still have to offer? As newer genres—movies, television, Youtube, TikTok—compete for our attention, why do people still immerse themselves in long works of prose fiction? And why do certain nineteenth-century British novels continue to captivate so many readers to this day? In this course, we will read four nineteenth-century novels by four authors that many consider to be the greatest writers that have ever lived: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. We will pay close attention to technique: how do these novels work? And we will also explore social and political themes: what are these novels about? At every stage, we will consider the unique capacities of narrative fiction: what can the novel do that other genres can’t? Implicitly and explicitly, this course will argue first, that these superlative nineteenth-century novels let us see the world (not only then but also now) in new ways, and second, that the novel is a tool for thinking that beats all others. Alongside these texts, we will watch film, television and theatre adaptations as well as read contemporary criticism to better understand the enduring legacy of these canonical works.

HUMANITIES 10

A Humanities Colloquium: from Homer to Joyce:  2,500 years of essential works, taught by six professors. Humanities 10a will tentatively include works by Homer, Sappho, Sophocles, Plato, Virgil, Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Descartes, Du Bois, Kafka and Woolf. One 75-minute lecture plus a 75-minute discussion seminar led by the professors every week.

I give lectures on: Othello, Pride and Prejudice, and Frankenstein.

CITY FICTIONS

Cities are made of contradictions: playgrounds for the rich and sites of concentrated poverty, highly organized and totally chaotic, an endless party and the loneliest places on earth. How do we write about them? In this course, we will visit six major metropolises around the world: London, Bombay, New York, Paris, Johannesburg, and Seoul. We will focus primarily on narrative works set these cities—Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Teju Cole’s Open City, Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot, and Ivan Vladislavic’s Portrait with Keys —and supplement our reading with short stories, journalism, sociology, movies, and television by writers and directors including: Zadie Smith, Micaela Coel, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Katherine Boo, Spike Lee and Bong Joon-Ho.

What techniques do fiction writers, journalists, and filmmakers use to capture the constituent features of life in urban environments? What can one genre do that another cannot? How do these narratives represent social interactions? How do they depict interiority and consciousness? What kinds of characters are included in the field of vision? What kind of labour, if any, is represented? How, if at all, does the identity of the writer shape the stories they are telling? Other topics under consideration: class, race, gender, industrialisation, finance, greed, alienation, strangers, estrangement, economic inequality, cosmopolitanism, crime, immigration.

READING POLITICALLY

“No book is genuinely free from political bias,” George Orwell wrote. Indeed. But how do we know what these biases are? How can we read not for plot or character but for ideology? Or rather, how can we read plot and character closely in order to uncover the political unconscious of a novel? How exactly does the novel “do” politics? What are its capacities and limitations as a genre? To answer these questions, we will read four of the most canonical realist novels of the nineteenth century: Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles alongside classic works of literary criticism (Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Terry Eagleton, Claudia Johnson, Elaine Scarry, Mary Poovey, and more).