106-408 The Novel & the Invention of the Modern

Formerly available as 106-017. Students who have completed 106-017 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Usually admission to the postgraduate diploma or fourth year honours in English or Creative Writing.

This subject examines the novel as a key genre within the ongoing history of modernity. It will trace formal and thematic developments within the genre in its current form from the early 19th century to the present. It will analyse how the novel has registered social and cultural changes, characteristic of modernity, over that period focusing on the novel's representation of everyday life especially as organised through class and sexuality. It will also address such matters as the genre's increasing cultural value and the transformations of its relations to other media, old and new. It aims to provide students with a general map of the novel's history against the backdrop of a society undergoing modernisation.

• be able to apply research skills and critical methods to a field of inquiry;

• develop persuasive arguments on a given topic;

• communicate oral and written arguments and ideas effectively and articulately.

An essay of 5000 words for 4th year students or 6000 words for masters students 100% (due at the end of the semester).

A subject reader will be available from the University Bookshop.

• Dickens, David Copperfield.
• Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground.
• Eliot, Middlemarch.
• Conrad, Lod Jim.
• Joyce, Portrait of the Artist.
• Forster, A Passage to India.
• Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
• Woolf, To the Lighthouse.
• Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury.
• Recommended Reading: Moretti, The Way of the World.
• Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination.
• Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel.
• Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel.
• Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction.