350:503

Index # - 13306

Distribution Requirement:  B, D

Tuesday – 1:10 p.m.

MU 207

Myra Jehlen and Richard Miller

Essays and Novels: Genre and the Nature of the Literary

Through readings of a list of essays and novels, we would like to arrive at a clearer understanding of what constitutes literature: of the literary.  The genres of the essay and the novel are historically and philosophically linked in that both embody an idea of literature as primarily concerned with the interior life.  At the same time, essays and novels are markedly different kinds of writing. This combination of formal differences and common themes, we think, may make it possible to get at what makes an essay or a novel a work of art rather than a written report. 

Aiming at an understanding of literature as such is a theoretical project; but since the theoretical findings are to emerge entirely from specific examples, the course is also a practical one, in critical reading.  We will take up both literary and critical works: essays and novels, and also critical writings on the essay and the novel, the latter selected with a view to the historical dimension of the literary: how it has been defined in different times. 

We would like this course to serve as an Americanist course as well as a theoretical one, so we will focus on American works; that is, after beginning with Montaigne, and for a parallel reason with Austen. This is a tentative list: Thoreau and Emerson; Hawthorne and Melville; and for both their essays and their novels, Howells and James. We would like to come into the twentieth century and possibly further, for instance with Roth some of whose novels are not clearly not essays.            

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