Theory of the Novel
Instructors: Armstrong and Garréta
Intended for graduate students and advanced undergraduates who want to pursue some area of novel, fiction, or narrative studies, this course examines a set of concepts that should provide them access to 1) the modes of thinking that characterize novels across the modern and contemporary periods and several different national traditions, 2) the various ways that critical theory has defined those concepts, and 3) reading the novel as a concept-driven argument in relation to other disciplinary discourses, especially critical theory.
The course begins by considering a long and robust tradition of critical theory focused on the novel. Why does the attempt to think about the modern world in dialectical terms encounter some kind of historical limit where that thinking stalls or breaks down? On what basis do novels nevertheless continue to be written, taught in classrooms, and circulated for the pleasure and edification of literat