| Welcome to The English Novel, a course
designed to investigate the literary, historical, cultural, social, and
economic import of the extraordinary genre/technique/device that we call
“the novel.”
We will begin the course by asking what it is that we mean when we call
something a novel. What is a novel? Is it a distinct, identifiable object,
such as a chair or a rock? Does it have a core set of attributes, or is
it a shifting, amorphous phenomenon? Is a novel its content? What difference
does the technology of the presentation of content make for what we consider
a “novel”? We will also ask other questions. Given the title
of this course, we will also ask, what does it mean for a novel to be
“English”? Is it an object that from the first moment announces
its national origin? Are there “American” novels that are
quite separate from ones we think of as English? (Both are written in
“English,” yes? What difference does that lack of difference
make?) Is a novel still “Japanese” even if it is translated
into English?
From these questions we will wend our way into an investigation of seven
texts. We will move from the first appearance of an amazingly novel device,
that is, the novel itself, to a contemporary object that is called a novel
but looks perhaps different than the things we have encountered before.
What does it mean for us to think about “the novel” as a form
or historically specific “thing”? During this particular critical/intellectual
investigation, we will come to terms with the importance of the novel
for our daily lives: from how it scripts the way we watch a movie to how
it conditions the way we come to believe ourselves to have psychologically
coherent, emotionally rich inner-lives. The books that you will be required
to read in this course will, for the most part, be drawn from texts written
within the United Kingdom, not simply “books in English.”
We will also read from a collection of essays that will help us to frame
the issues at stake as well as start us on the way to answering the questions
that we find of interest.
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Tyler Curtain is an Assistant Professor of English here at UNC
Chapel Hill.
Professor Curtain has taught courses in literary criticism, critical
theory, gay and lesbian literature and culture, among other subjects.
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How
it is that novels came to exist is one of the oldest questions in
literary criticism.
How we attempt to answer that question calls up a host of other
important though complex considerations. No account of the novel
can ignore its historical dimensions. This is one reason that we
have chosen The Theory of the Novel as a basic textbook
for this course.
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