350:566

Index # 72870

Distribution Requirement:  A4

Tuesday – 4:30 p.m.

MU 207

David Kurnick

The Social Imagination of the 19th Century Novel

Even as it involved readers in the particular fates of a few spotlit imaginary people, the nineteenth-century realist novel also depicted an unprecedentedly expansive social canvas.  This course will examine the novel’s ambition to represent an abstraction called “society” as a narrative and ethical problem, and develop a vocabulary to account for the ways the problem was solved. We will be trying to multiply the theoretical ways we can talk about imaginative abstraction: How do the classic realist novelists build out from the details of individual lives to convey a sense of social amplitude? How is readerly attention managed between the foreground and background (if we can tell which is which)? We will be trying to answer these questions in terms of concrete narrative and stylistic procedures. What specific techniques did the classic realist novelists develop to encourage a leap from the characterological to the social, or from the local to the global: analogy, symbolism, multi-plottedness, extreme typicality or extreme marginality, synecdoche, reverberation, resonance, etc. How did these techniques work with or interfere with one another?

We’ll combine close and relatively slow readings of a smallish number of major primary texts with a lot of theoretical and critical material. Because nineteenth-century fiction’s aspiration to social representation were related to developments in adjacent disciplines, we’ll be tracing the formal and historical exchanges between fiction and the genres of anthropology, sociology, statistics, evolutionary science, and urban reportage. We’ll also be considering Marxist theories of totality, classic sociology’s notion of the ideal type, and more recent philosophical accounts of social assemblage and social complexity. 

Requirements:

One in-class presentation, Seminar Paper of 20-30 pp.

Possible novels:

Dickens, Bleak House

Eliot, Middlemarch

Gissing, The Nether-World

Scott, The Heart of Mid-Lothian

Thackeray, Vanity Fair

Zola, Germinal

Possible additional readings (excerpts and essays):

Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cultivation and the Cultivation of Detachment

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling”

Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art

James Buzard, Disorienting Fiction: The Autoethnographic Work of Nineteenth-Century British Novels

Auguste Comte, Introduction to Positive Philosophy

Manuel Delanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity

Emile Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method

Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England

Catherine Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of the English Novel

Dorothy Hale, Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present

Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth-Century Novel

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

Georg Lukacs, The Historical Novel

------. Studies in European Realism

Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor

Pam Morris, Imagining Inclusive Society in Nineteenth-Century Novels: The Code of Sincerity in the Public Sphere

Hanna Pitkin, The Concept of Representation

Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830-1864

Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms

Herbet Spencer, The Principles of Sociology

E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture

Alex Woloch, The One vs. The Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel

Max Weber, “Objectivity in the Social Sciences”

Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950