Fall 2008 Courses

English 331-01: British Novel in the 19th Century and the Everyday (Allen)

T/TH 9:40-11:10am HUM 226

The Nineteenth-Century Novel and the Everyday explores the multiple connections - formal, thematic, cultural, even material - between modernity's most enduring literary form, the novel, and the concept of "everydayness" or the "ordinary" within modernity. How did the novel's eventual dominance within British literary life depend upon its ability to express and in fact reproduce the quotidian? We will investigate the multiple formal means by which the novel managed to become the form of "the prose of the world." A series of subsidiary topics related to the everyday - boredom; objects and commodities; manners; customs and habits, or everyday "practices" - will structure our course. Alongside our readings of some representative novels we will be surveying the range of theories of everyday life from aesthetic, sociological, philosophical, and political perspectives.

Our course texts will include novels by Austen, Eliot, Thackeray, Gissing, Hardy, and Trollope, with secondary readings from de Certeau, Barthes, Benjamin, Adorno, Bourdieu, and others. Recommended summer reading: Middlemarch - get a jump on the semester's fiction!

*First day attendance required.*

Fall 2008 Course Listings