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Seminar: Topics in Literary Theory

01- How they write novels; how we read them: Austen, Dickens, Eliot; Hawthorne, Melville, Twain
This is a seminar in the novel that is also a course in reading novels.  We will focus on six novels, three by English writers (Austen, Dickens, Eliot); three by American writers (Hawthorne, Melville, Twain).  From six entirely different ways of writing novels, we will try to assemble an idea of novel-writing itself, and from six experiences of novel-reading, an idea of reading itself.

In addition, a two-week segment of the seminar will diverge somewhat from the rest of the course by taking up the subject of translation, or of literature across different languages: do the issues of writing and of reading change in relation to specific languages, and how?  For these two weeks we will read a novella in French, in its English translation, and in its rewritten form by an American writer.  The novella is Flaubert's Un coeur simple, translated as A Simple Heart.  The rewritten form is Gertrude Stein's "The Good Anna."  No knowledge of French is required for this segment of the course.