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
Abstract
This essay looks at the history of the novel, starting from the influential postwar critical insistence on the importance of the novel as a nineteenth-century genre. It notes that this tradition singularly fails to take account of the history of the novel in antiquity–for clear ideological reasons. It then explores the degree to which the texts known as the novel from antiquity, such as Longus’s
Daphnis and Chloe, Petronius’s
Satyricon, or Heliodorus’s
Aethiopica, constitute a genre. Although there is a great deal of porousness between different forms of prose in antiquity, the essay concludes by exploring why the ancient novel, ignored by critics for so long, has now become such a hot topic. It argues that much as the postwar critics could not fit the ancient novel into their histories, now the ancient novel’s interests in sophisticated erotics, narrative flair, and cultural hybridity seem all too timely.