What can eight great novels tell us about the people, politics, and places of the long twentieth century? How can we read historically, comparatively, contextually and contemporaneously all at once? One way of tackling the world building form of the novel is by pairing novels that rewrite, adapt, echo, speak with, talk back to or otherwise take flight from predecessor texts. The idea that a novel is not contained by its own papery walls compels us to think critically about cultural (dis)inheritances, discursive legacies, genre reinvention, and cultural mythmaking. This course will engage core literary historical questions of voice, style, form and content, description, character, point of view, and narrative context in four paired novels as they speak to one another (and much else) across time and place: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005); Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1999); EM Forster's Howards End (1910) and Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2005). You will learn to read closely and with precision, and to write with specificity, exactitude, imagination and rigor.
5 units · Letter (ABCD/NP) · GER: WAY-A-II
What can eight great novels tell us about the people, politics, and places of the long twentieth century? How can we read historically, comparatively, contextually and contemporaneously all at once? One way of tackling the world building form of the novel is by pairing novels that rewrite, adapt, echo, speak with, talk back to or otherwise take flight from predecessor texts. The idea that a novel is not contained by its own papery walls compels us to think critically about cultural (dis)inheritances, discursive legacies, genre reinvention, and cultural mythmaking. This course will engage core literary historical questions of voice, style, form and content, description, character, point of view, and narrative context in four paired novels as they speak to one another (and much else) across time and place: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966); Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go (2005); Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1999); EM Forster's Howards End (1910) and Zadie Smith's On Beauty (2005). You will learn to read closely and with precision, and to write with specificity, exactitude, imagination and rigor.
Offered in Winter 2027 at Stanford University.