THE NOVEL: LIFE IN LONG FORM
"The novel is the book of life." - D.H. Lawrence
Please note: C LIT 252 A IS THE SAME AS SLAV 320, "EAST EUROPEAN FICTION."
IF ONE OF THESE TWO SECTIONS IS FULL, PLEASE JUST ENROLL IN THE OTHER!
Please note: To foster a successful transition to winter quarter, our class will be conducted remotely in the first week. This will reduce potential disruptions to courses by allowing you extra time to get boosters, post-travel tests and to monitor for symptoms. Please get your booster shot if you haven't already done so!
I look forward to resuming regular instruction and meeting you all in person the second week of the classes!!
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While we can be outdoing ourselves with how brief and short-lasting our verbal expression gets in tweets or snapchats, the novel – the longest literary form – happily lives on over the centuries and into our times. More than that: Don Quixote (1605), a novel by Miguel Cervantes, for example, sold five hundred million copies few years ago. In general, the novel as a literary form continues to be the preferred reading of readers world-wide.
What is it about this literary form that makes it so appealing, enduring, and global? What do readers find in it? Your online dictionary provides an easy answer, defining the novel as "a fictitious prose narrative of considerable length and complexity, portraying characters and usually presenting a sequential organization of action and scenes." We will look into this genre more carefully. Giving a tantalizing taste of several major novels from around the world, including lesser known yet fascinating East European and Slavic novels, and delving more deeply into three (short) ones—James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Willa Cather's My Ántonia, and Tõnu Õnnepalu's Border State—this class will look at this genre’s historical development, shared formal characteristics across time and space, and adaptations of novels into other media. We will try to get acquainted with some of the novels that have made a global impact and some that are known to only a few, and we will try to find the reasons for this fictional genre’s lasting human attraction. No prerequisites.
Please note: this is an in-person class.