But as English majors, or people interested in English, we all need to know! At least, we need to know about the novel part of the analogy…
So, we’re going to do that. But, first…
Housekeeping: Group Work and schedule for the Final paper
Major Final Projects, beside the Final Exam
Group Presentations: 10% of final grade
These presentations will be 20 minutes long, and will occur throughout the semester. In groups of three or four, you will be presenting to the class on important historical and cultural information that you believe contextualizes a specific text or texts that we will be reading this semester. These will begin in three weeks. Pick your groups this week, topics by the middle of next week.
Long Research Paper:30% of final grade
This paper will build on your short research paper. It will propose a mature literary argument capable of sustaining the intense critical scrutiny of your peers. The length will be 6-7 pages, and you will need to use 8-10 peer-reviewed secondary sources. It is due at the end of week fifteen.
1) Journal Activity: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)
What are novels? If you had to summarize the genre or come up with a list of its common features and qualities, what would they be, and why? Can we do this?
2) Group Work: Share your findings, compare your answers, and try to come up with a common understanding.
Mini-Lecture on The Novel:
1) The novel grows out of the Romance, a popular form of heroic prose popular with aristocrats in the medieval and early modern periods. The Arthurian Legends, for example, are a Romantic tradition.
The novel emerged as a way of making fun of these conventions, of parodying them and questioning how they related to life as it was lived by middle-class individuals.
Lacking Dragons, Giants, or real enemies — Quixote took on windmills –
Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) is a very early example of such writing.
Other writers, such as John Bunyan, used the conventions of the romance to dramatize the religious struggles of the “common man.” You can see this in “The Pilgrim’s Progress” — one of the most famous books so far. (1627)
However, the novel as you or I recognize it is more in-line with works that emerged at the beginning of the 18th century:
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Pamela (1740)
Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
By 1749, the epistolary convention is replaced by what we would now regard as the “chapter structure.” This change is important, because it raises questions about the authority of the narrator. In the epistolary format, what we read is supposed to be true because of its format. But when we have chapters, we have to start to rely on the assumed authority of the narrator. We see this in Tom Jones (1949). Authority issues are a defining characteristic of the middle-class.
It is no coincidence that it is right around this time that see the development of the Gothic novel. In 1762, Horace Walpole gives us “The Castle of Otranto.” The narrator here is deeply manipulative, setting a mood and tone designed to scare us and create suspense.
In the Victorian Age, the novel was the dominate form of reading.
Published in three-volume editions.
Because questions of authority always circulate around the novel, Victorian novelists asserted their understanding of “reality” by depicting large and comprehensive social worlds, with plots that supposedly illustrated the deep structures of the social world.
It was (is) a middle-class art form. The novel depicted the material conditions that informed social status. It also illustrated how social tensions bear on personal aspirations. The novel was focused on portrayals of women, for entertainment and to engender social sympathy.
While they sound a great deal like the novels of today, Novels were generally not published all at once, but, rather, in serials, then collected into volumes.
Notable Victorian writers: Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, W.M. Thackeray
Modern novels, like To The Lighthouse, represent verisimilitude in another way: Namely, through the dialog between interior and exterior life, which most of us are aware of, but which is rarely dramatized.
The subject was (is) no small concern, for a number of reasons. First, this is a world still struggling to work out the implications of Darwin, Freud, and World War One – which we won’t get to talk about until next time – but which effectively shattered all the social conventions of the Victorian period, and set into motions the post-modern world that we all now live in.
Mini-Lecture in Action: In your journals, I want you to address the following question.
What role, if any, do you think the issue of authority plays in popular entertainment? In television shows? In movies? In modern novels? Where does the source of an entertainment’s “realness” come from?
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