COMPLIT 123: The Novel

Course Description

The novel has been defined as the kind of writing that emerges from "a world from which God has departed" (Lukacs, Theory of the Novel). From this perspective, the theme of the novel is then limited to the individual, as opposed to a whole community, as in epic. Historically, the novel originates in the tension between the world of romance and that of reality, with Cervantes's Don Quijote as its primary instance, and irony is the determining and organizing principle of the novel's form. In our course, we will read a range of novels from early modern Spain and continental Europe; theories of the novel; 19th-century realism; modernist and postmodern experiments, including examples from the contemporary avant gardes of the world, and the hemispheric, transnational Americas and the Global South. Through our readings we will determine what novels are, what they are for, how should we read them, and how do novel help in constituting a world.