Menke, Richard
TR 12:45 PM
Park Hall 0139
What is the story of the novel? And why should the novel seem so much more mutable and harder to theorize than, say, epic poetry or tragic drama?
In this class, we’ll read criticism and theory about the novel as a genre (from McKeon’s Theory of the Novel anthology and elsewhere), as well as fiction from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The critical writing assigned for the class will ask you to put our theories into practice—to draw on the theory in order to interpret our novels, and and to draw on our novels in order to try out and assess the theories we read.
This class is the core, required course for the “Studies in the Novel” Area of Emphasis in the English major, but it will also give you a sense of how the novel continues to shape and to be shaped by other literary genres, other forms of narrative, and other media.
Required texts: