Graduate Course Description

Fiction

Novacich, Sarah / Zitin, Abigail

This course explores the complex answers to a deceptively simple question: what's the relationship between fiction and literature? The primary axis along which fiction is defined is that of truth and untruth, an obvious statement that has nevertheless been obscured by the ascendancy of the novel in literary history, a history that has tended to focus on realism. But fiction, considered philosophically and historically, is bigger than realism; it includes flagrant as well as subtle untruths which its status as literature transforms into something other than lies. Scholars—chief among them medievalists like Julie Orlemanski—have in recent years challenged an understanding of fiction that ties its attributes too closely to enlightenment modernity (which is also to say, to Western Europe). In this seminar, we will consider works from the late medieval period, asking how poetic “making,” romance plotting, and extra-biblical elaboration contribute to ideas of fiction avant la lettre (reading work by Marie de France, Chretien de Troyes, Dante, and Chaucer). We will take up the inheritances that informed such work, especially classical philosophy and biblical hermeneutics (Aristotle, Augustine), as well as the influence medieval understandings of truth and untruth, imaginative process, and literal and figural meaning continued to have on later periods. We will consider the following questions: where does realism come from? What is the relationship between romance and the novel? Sacred truth and imaginative forms of devotion? Allegorical and non-allegorical characters? The acceptance of figural meanings and the suspension of disbelief? And we will examine the debate over fictionality as it has unfolded in recent literary criticism, tracing its movement from an 18th-century context (the rise of the novel) to the Middle Ages and beyond. "Beyond" may include, for example, contemporary genres founded in the political, sometimes utopian, affordances of counterfactual modes (speculative fiction, critical fabulation, autofiction, “nonfiction”—creative or otherwise). Along the way, we will read work by some or all of the following authors: Laura Ashe, Erich Auerbach, Octavia Butler, Susan Choi, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Colin Dayan, Robert Edwards, Catherine Gallagher, Saidiya Hartman, Geraldine Heng, David Hume, Sarah Kay, Monika Otter, Nicholas Paige, Kendall Walton, and Marjory Curry Woods. Students will be responsible for presentations, a variety of short to medium-length writing assignments, and active participation.

Thinking about the place of more distant historical periods in the evolving discipline, we are designing the course on the premise that the majority of our students will have lots of experience thinking about later forms of fiction, including the novel. The idea is to fill in some conceptual and historical background on what fiction is, what it has been and can be for, the place it occupies in (contemporary) culture, and why we’ve come to devote the kinds of critical attention to it that distinguishes the discipline of literary study from other disciplines concerned with culture and history.