The Modern European Novel

3 units

"A register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" -- that is what Gibbon said history is. Being another kind of historian, the novelist confronts these selfsame catastrophes, this wreckage that human nature brings to pass. And whether what he chronicles is upon the great stage of events or upon the secret stage of the heart, the truth the novelist tells us must always be that of individuals overmatched by crimes and follies and misfortunes. Pathos is the novelist's stock-in-trade. We shall study the modern pathos, the particularly painful record of twentieth-century history -- a sequence of unexampled barbarisms alongside of (and interconnected with) the unexampled advances in science and technology -- through novels from several different national traditions. Our working assumption is that these books, at the end of the day, can best tell us what to make of the crimes, the follies, and misfortunes of Europe in our century: The Road into the Open (Arthur Schnitzler); The Vatican Cellars (Andre Gide); The Trial (Franz Kafka); The Confessions of Zeno (Italo Svevo); Young Torless (Robert Musil); Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (Thomas Mann); The Gift (Vladimir Nabokov); Journey to the End of Night (Louis-Ferdinand Celine); Kaputt (Curzio Malaparte); The Sword of Honour Trilogy (Evelyn Waugh); Cancer Ward (Alexander Solzhenitsyn). Prior to our first meeting, and with a view to beginning to sort out the place of historical events in modern fiction, students are asked to read two works telling not of our own but of other centuries -- Memoirs of Hadrian (Marguerite Yourcenar) and The Leopard (Giuseppe di Lampedusa), both available now at the University bookstore.