Postgraduate Course: Exploring the Novel (ENLI11200)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course will examine a range of novels from a variety of periods and introduce students to various critical debates surrounding the form. We will examine selected works with a particular emphasis on questions such as: are there specific formal elements that characterize those narratives we call 'novels' and if so, what might they be? What is meant by terms such as 'realism' 'modernism' 'romanticism' 'bilgungrsroman' and what might be at stake in debates over how these terms are defined? What are the uses and limitations of such terms and the narrative elements they describe and inscribe? Is it significant that the history of the novel in Britain coincides with the rise of women as fictional subjects and female authorship? Do novels produced in other cultural contexts rely on slightly different formal elements?
Places on this course will be offered to students on the MSc in Creative Writing in the First instance. |
| Course description |
Not entered
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Academic year 2014/15, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Quota: 30 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 22,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
174 )
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| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
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| Additional Information (Assessment) |
4000 word essay (100%)
Formative assessment will take the form of a reading journal with weekly entries of 250-300 words, due 3 days prior to each class. The tutor will provide written responses every 3 weeks. |
| Feedback |
Not entered |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
| Students will acquire knowledge of a range of works from a variety of periods and gain a firmer sense of the history of the form and its accompanying criticism. They will be able to demonstrate familiarity with critical and theoretical debates surrounding terms such as 'realism' 'modernism' 'romanticism' and so on and will have been encouraged to consider how these ideas and debates might deepen one's understanding of narrative form.
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Reading List
Additional reading:
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. OUP, 1987.
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Orion, 1964.
Baxter, Charles, Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Greywolf, 2008.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Harvard UP, 1992.
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: a Guide to Narrative Craft. Longman, 2011.
Butler, Marilyn. Jane Austen and the War of Ideas. Oxford UP, 1975. Rev. Ed. 1987.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Vintage, 1993.
Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York, Columbia UP: 1994.
Cowan, Andrew. The Art of Writing Fiction. Longman, 2011.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rosseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. Yale UP, 1979.
Fiedler, Lesley A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. Ed. 1966. Org. Pub. 1960.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard UP, 1980.
Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft. Vintage, 2001.
Garrett, Peter K. The Victorian Multiplot Novel: studies in dialogical form. Yale UP: 1980.
Gourevitch, Philip. The Paris Review Interviews. Canongate, 2009. (See also www.theparisreview.org)
Hale, Dorothy, Ed. The Novel: an anthology of criticism and theory 1900-2000. Oxford UP, 2005.
Hardy, Barbara. The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form. Althone Press, 1959.
Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Routledge, 1980.
James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. Scribner, 1962.
Jauss, David. Alone with All That Could Happen: Rethinking Conventional Wisdom About the Craft of Fiction Writing. Writer's Digest Books, 2008.
Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading.
Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.
Johnson, Claudia L. Jane Austen: Women, Politics and the Novel. U of Chicago P, 1988.
Laplanche, John. Essays on Otherness. Ed. John Fletcher. Routledge, 1999.
Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. MIT Press, 1994. Org. Pub. 1920.
Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel. Princeton UP, 1981.
Harvey, Sally Peltier. Redefining the American dream: the novels of Willa Cather, Farleigh Dickenson UP, 1995.
Sand, Georges. The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters. Hard Press, 2006.
Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. OUP, 1966.
Silber, Joan. The Art of Time in Fiction: as long as it takes. Greywolf, 2009.
Strachey, James. 'Some Unconscious Factors in Reading', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 2 (1930):130-43.
Stevick, Philip, Editor. The Theory of the Novel. Macmillan, 1967.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. California UP, 1957.
Welty, Eudora. The Eye of the Story: selected essays and reviews. Virago, 1987.
Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. Scribner, 1924.
Winters, Laura. Willa Cather: landscape and exile. Susquehana UP, 1994.
Wood, James. How Fiction Works. Vintage, 2009.
Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader, First Series, 1925. Rpt. New York, 1953. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
WEEK 1: Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
WEEK 2: Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
WEEK 3: Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses
WEEK 4: Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
WEEK 5: George Eliot, Middlemarch
INNOVATIVE LEARNING WEEK
WEEK 6: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
WEEK 7: Eugene McCabe, Death and Nightingales
WEEK 8: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity¿s Rainbow
WEEK 9: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity¿s Rainbow
WEEK 10: Patricia Duncker, Hallucinating Foucault.
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| Keywords | EtN |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Allyson Stack
Tel: (0131 6)50 4290
Email: allyson.stack@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Sophie Bryan
Tel: (0131 6)50 3030
Email: Sophie.Bryan@ed.ac.uk |
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