Tuesday, September 5th
Booth, from The Rhetoric of Fiction (pdf in 2 parts: Booth, Part 1 and Booth, Part 2)
Vocabulary: new criticism; intentional fallacy; implied author (“second self”); 3 types of literary interest
Definition of New Criticism (from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms)
“New Critics treated literary works, which they viewed as carefully crafted, orderly objects containing observable formal patterns, as self-contained and self-referential and thus based their interpretations on elements within the text rather than on external factors such as the effects of a work or biographical and historical materials [. . . ] reject[ing] the practice of basing interpretation on an author’s intentions, which they called the intentional fallacy” (335-336); New Critics had a deep investment in the notion of objectivity, which you can see is under critique in Booth’s essay.
Abbott, “Narration” (pdf)
Key terms and ideas from Abbott
Narrator; direct discourse; indirect discourse; direct thought (including the modernist interior monologue); indirect thought; and free indirect thought (also called free indirect discourse)
Voice: point-of-view, inclusive of first-person, second-person, and third-person (distinguishes between third-person and omniscient)
Focalization: sensitivity to shift from the voice of the third-person narrator and a character within the text
Distance: diegesis (narrative world or storyworld); homodiegetic (a character within the story narrates), heterodiegetic and extradiegetic narration (both narrative voices are outside of the text but extradiegetic narration seeks greater distance and objectivity)
Narrator reliability; unreliable narrator; implied author; discordant narrators
Free indirect style = free indirect discourse
Differences between stream-of-consciousness, interior monologue, and free indirect style
Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation” (pdf)
Key Passages
“In proposing this cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation, I do not wish to deny these categories their specific histories and particular meanings within different political languages. What I am attempting to formulate in this chapter are the complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ and make them immanent subjects of a range of social and literary narratives” (718)
Two full passages at the top of pg. 722, beginning “It is precisely in reading between these border lines of the nation-space . . .” and concluding “It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation.”
From the paragraph beginning “Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase . . .” to the end of that paragraph on the following page (724-25)
“Once the liminality of the nation-space is established, and its signifying difference is turned from the boundary ‘outside’ to its finitude ‘within,’ the threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of ‘other’ people. It becomes a question of otherness of the people-as-one.” (726)
Notion of “living perplexity” (731)
Karavanta, “Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and the Counterwriting of Negative Communities: A Postnational Novel,” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 58, no. 4, Winter 2012, pp. 723-746. (Galileo pdf; note that the first page of the pdf is blank)
Important Vocabulary: postnational; counterwriting; multicentric narration
In Class Writing: Say/Ask Exercise
- SAY [Statement, thought, epiphany, comment, critique, posit]
- ASK [Question, query, confusion]
Write one to three sentences for each of the two above directions, connecting your readings to each other (i.e. both primary source material (Moll Flanders and A Mercy) and secondary sources (Booth, Abbott, Bhaba, and Karavanta). Feel free to make connections between any and all of these texts. Include page numbers of any passages that triggered your thought or question.
Devoney Looser (Professor of English, Arizona State University), “The Making of Jane Austen,” TODAY, Tuesday, September 5th, Park Hall 265, 4:30-6:00 PM.
You may receive up to 1 extra point on your final exam grade by attending Dr. Looser’s talk. Please pay close and respectful attention during the presentation. After the talk, please submit a 2-paragraph response. Your response should go beyond mere summary, making connections to other literature you have studied or read.
Thursday, September 7th
Realism (McKeon 587-591)
Barthes, “The Reality Effect” (.pdf), pub. 1969
Important Terms: structuralism, post-structuralism, sign, signifier, signified, the “third order,” “death of the author,” verisimilitude, insignificant notation and the “reality effect”
Belsey, from Critical Practice (.pdf), published 1980
Important Terms: Ideology, Interpellation, Classic Realism, Illusionism, Closure, Hierarchy of Voices, Discourse/History, Utterance and Enunciation (énoncé)
Levine, from The Realistic Imagination (McKeon 613-631), published 1983
Important Concept: Levine’s 3 main points about realism (620)
An Incomplete Chronology of Literary Theory
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Tuesday, September 12th
Class cancelled due to Hurricane Irma
Thursday, September 14th
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Volume I)
Armstrong, from Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (McKeon 467-475); published 1987
*We’ll also be returning to Belsey’s Critical Practice today.
An “epistolary novel” is “a novel whose plot is entirely developed through letters, whether through an exchange of letters between multiple characters or through the correspondence of only one character. The form has been employed for the immediacy it lends the narrative (that is, events are recounted just after — and occasionally even during — the moment of their occurrence) as well as the opportunity it provides to reveal the intimate, private thought s of characters” (The Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms 110)
Free Indirect Discourse: “the way, in many narratives, that the reports of what a character says and thinks shift in pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode, as we move — or sometimes hover — between the direct narrated reproductions of these events as they occur to the character and the indirect representation of such events by the narrator” (from Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms)
“Discourse that is represented, rather than directly related, to the reader . . . in which the thoughts, statements, and even dialogues engaged in by the characters are recounted to the reader” (The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms)
In Class Writing: Say/Ask Exercise
- SAY [Statement, thought, epiphany, comment, critique, posit]
- ASK [Question, query, confusion]
Write one to three sentences for each of the two above directions, connecting your readings to each other (i.e. both primary source material (Pride and Prejudice) and secondary sources (Belsey and Armstrong; but you might also bring in readings from Abbott (narrative), Novak (word play), or Barthes (the reality effect). Feel free to make connections between any and all of these texts. Include page numbers of any passages that triggered your thought or question.
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Tuesday, September 19th
Pride and Prejudice (Volume II and III)
In Class Writing: Say/Ask Exercise
- SAY [Statement, thought, epiphany, comment, critique, posit]
- ASK [Question, query, confusion]
Write one to three sentences for each of the two above directions, focusing on the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice. Please feel free to bring in earlier reading in theory and/or literary criticism. (Belsey and Armstrong will still be the focus of today’s discussion; but you might also bring in readings from Abbott (narrative), Novak (word play), or Barthes (the reality effect). Feel free to make connections between any and all of these texts. Include page numbers of any passages that triggered your thought or question.
Thursday, September 21st
Miller, “No One Is Alone,” (Norton 314-321); published 2003
Definition of Style: “Style has traditionally been defined as the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse — as how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say. The style specific to a particular work or writer, or else distinctive of a type of writings, has been analyzed in such terms as the rhetorical situation and aim (see rhetoric); the characteristic diction, or choice of words; the type of sentence structure and syntax; and the density and kinds of figurative language.” (Abrams and Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 9th edition, pp. 349).
See also the OED definition of “style”
Nunokawa, “Speechless in Austen,” (Norton 321-331); published 2005
Elphenbein, “Austen’s Minimalism,” (Norton 331-338); published 2013
If you haven’t seen any Pride and Prejudice adaptations, I strongly recommend that you do so over the weekend. They are delightful! Here is a starting point for you to explore what is out there.
Webseries: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (2012),
*First Short Writing Assignment Due by Friday at 8:00 pm: electronic submission*
TODAY: Daniel Heath Justice is a professor of First Nations and Indigenous Studies, in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, with a cross appointment in English at the University of British Columbia. His American Indian Returnings (AIR) talk is titled: “Cartographic Kinscapes: Hometakings, Homecomings, and Reading the Ruptures of Indigenous Dispossession” takes place TODAY, Thursday September 21st, Georgia Museum of Art, Griffith Auditorium, 4:15 PM.
You may receive up to 1 extra point on your final exam grade by attending this talk. Please pay close and respectful attention during the presentation. After the talk, submit a 2-paragraph response. Your response should go beyond mere summary, making connections to other literature you have studied or read.
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Tuesday, September 26th
Jo Baker, Longbourn (Volumes One and Two, through page 214)
Porter, “Adaptation across Media” (pdf)
I think of Longbourn — if this is not too much of an aspiration — as being in the same tradition as Wide Sargasso Sea or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It’s a book that engages with Austen’s novel in a similar way to Jean Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre and Tom Stoppard’s to Hamlet. I found something in the existing text that niggled me, that felt unresolved, and wanted to explore it further. That was the pull for me, that sense of unresolvedness* — I can’t really speculate on what it was for other writers: I’m afraid I don’t know the other fictions around Austen’s work terribly well at all.
*The unresolvedness for me was to do with being a lifelong fan of Austen’s work, but knowing that recent ancestors of mine had been in service. I loved her work, but I didn’t quite belong in it — and I felt the need to explore that further.
(NPR Interview with Jo Baker)
Thursday, September 28th
Longbourn (Volume Three, finish novel)
Lowder Newton, from “Women, Power and Subversion” (pdf)
Choose one of the following scenes and describe the significance of Baker’s “mapping” of Longbourn’s plot onto that of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. And by significance here, I mean the dominant themes and narrative concerns of Baker’s text (Closed Book)
- Jane’s walk to Netherfield and Sarah’s walk to Meryton
- The Netherfield Ball
- Lydia’s elopement
- Elizabeth’s marriage to Darcy
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