SJTU Summer School Proposal: How Novels Work

 

Why do societies produce novels, how do individuals create them, and why should we read them today? This class stages a worldwide inquiry into how long narrative texts operate. We will read four major extended prose narratives—part of Cao Xuequin’s The Dream of the Red Chamber (mid-1700s), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Claire Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)—to develop collectively an account of how novels work. We will, in other words, write our own course manual as we go along, helped in our inquiries by literary critics from around the world.

 

Primary texts:

Cao Xeuquin, The Dream of the Red Chamber (trans. Hawkes as The Story of the Stone), vol. 1 (Penguin)

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (OUP)

Claire Lispector, The Hour of the Star (New Directions)

Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage Classics)

Michael McKeon, ed., Theory of the Novel (JHU)

 

Week one: Cao Xuequin, The Dream of the Red Chamber, vol. 1 (Penguin edn.)

Hour one: Red Chamber 1

Hour two: Zadie Smith, “Fascinated to Presume”; Alex Woloch, from The One vs. the Many

Hour three: Red Chamber 2

Hour four: Marina KcKay, “Why the Novel Matters,” The Cambridge Introduction to the Novel

Hour five: Red Chamber 3

Hour six: McKay, “Narrating the Novel” and “Character and the Novel,”

Hour seven: Red Chamber 4

Hour eight: McKay, “Plotting the Novel”

 

Week two: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Hour one: P&P 1

Hour two: Meeuwis, from How Austen Works

Hour three: P&P 2

Hour four: Meeuwis, from How Austen Work

Hour five: P&P 3

Hour six: Meeuwis, from How Austen Works

Hour seven: P&P 5

Hour eight: Armstrong, from Desire and Domestic Fiction (McKeon anthology)

 

Week three: Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

Hour one: Lispector 1

Hour two: Woloch, from The One vs. the Many

Hour three: Lispector 2

Hour four: Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (McKeon anthology)

Hour five: Lispector 3

Hour six: Roberto Schwarz, chapter one, A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism

Hour seven: Lispector 5

Hour eight: Seymour Chatman, from Story and Discourse

 

Week four: Toni Morrison, Beloved

Hour one: Morrison 1

Hour two: Jonathan Culler, “Toward a Theory of Non-Genre Literature”

Hour three: Morrison 2

Hour four: Mikhail Bakhtin, from The Dialogic Imagination (McKeon anthology

Hour five: Morrison 3

Hour six: Michael Bell, from The Development of American Romance (McKeon anthology)

Hour seven: Morrison 4

Hour eight: Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, from Language and Materialism (McKeon anthology)