The Art of the Novel

3 units

This course will take as its starting point traditional models of the novel and will then examine a variety of novels from different traditions - American, British, continental - which in differing ways play against this type, bending, challenging or ignoring the rules. We will be interested in attempting to understand the logic of such idiosyncratic forms, both why each writer is attempting to defy or undo our understanding of a normative reality and of the usual novelistic proprieties and how each novel provides its own manner of coherence.