English: The Political Novel (B)

About ENGL 3400 B

Advanced study in nineteenth-century literature. Representative topics: The Beat Generation; Literature and Society in Modern Ireland; Dostoevsky's Influence on Twentieth-century American Literature. May be repeated for credit with different content. Topics vary by offering; periodic offering at intervals that may exceed four years. Credit not awarded for both ENGL 3400 and ENGL 5300. Prerequisites: ENGL 1500, ENGL 2000; English major, Secondary Education major with a concentration in English, or English minor; minimum Junior standing.

Notes

Prerequisites: ENGL 1500, ENGL 2000; English major, Secondary Education major with a concentration in English, or English minor; minimum Junior standing. System waitlisting enabled for this section

Section Description

In this course, we will read novels by six English and American authors—Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Robert Penn Warren, and Ralph Ellison—that seek in a variety of ways to grapple with the crisis of modernity. We will read our texts as political novels, understanding politics in the broadest sense of the term, meaning not only parliamentary and electoral politics (along with all of the struggles they encompass as to ideology, national and cultural identity, and the distribution of resources and power within and among different groups of people defined by such attributes as social class, caste, race, gender, and religion) but also all of the differences, tensions, and conflicts that emerge whenever two or more people are in any way associated or conjoined. As Aristotle says in Part II of his Politics, man (Aristotle’s term here for the generic human being) is “by nature a political animal” and politics begins, he says, with the binary female-male pair necessary for reproduction. Thus, we will be concerned as much (and sometimes more) with sexual politics—and with issues of class and race—as with ideologies, national policy, and statecraft. Primary readings: Conrad's The Secret Agent, Lawrence's Women in Love, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Warren's All the King's Men, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Ellison's Invisible Man. Secondary readings in narrative and political theory from Aristotle to Althusser.

Section Expectation

It is expected that students will complete all assigned readings on time and attend seminar regularly. There will be a short reading response paper (600 to 1000 words) on each novel and a final paper (approximately 4000 words) on a novel not on our syllabus, to be chosen by each student in consultation with the instructor. Novels chosen for the final paper must be read by mid-semester; in the last six weeks of the semester, each student will make a brief seminar report outlining the issues raised by her chosen novel and the approach she will take to it in her final paper.

Evaluation

Relative weights as factored into final grade: reading response papers, 50% (average of five highest grades on six papers); seminar report, 10%; final paper, 40%.

Important Dates

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