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43359
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Lecture-Discussion
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T
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3:00PM
-4:50PM
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R
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113 English Building
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Mahaffey, V
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- Part of Term:
- 1
- Date Range:
- 01/14/13-05/01/13
- Section Title:
- End of Omniscience
- Section Info:
- Topic Section T: The End of Omniscience: Stylistic Revolution(s) in the Modernist Novel One of the famous innovations of the modernist novel was that it dispensed with the omniscient third-person narrator. But what replaced that narrator? The usual answer is the ?stream-of-consciousness? technique, or else ?multiple perspectives.? This course is designed to inventory the problem, trace the history of the suggested solution(s), and finally to formulate the various kinds of stylistic ?replacements? for omniscience were devised by both male and female writers. In some sense, the Modernist novel might be understood as a kick-back to the eighteenth-century epistolary novel, except that the communication of a character?s thoughts is not usually recorded in letters, nor is it addressed to a recipient or designed to convey a specific message. However, one could argue that the narration is re-embodied; or, to put it a little differently, the source of the narrative is often an individual body rather than a ?divine? mind or even the mind of an older person, broadened by experience. Narrative becomes less retrospective, more rooted in the unfolding experience of the present moment and constrained by the limitations of the senses and the individual memory. We will begin with Flaubert, as one should in a course on the Modernist novel. Madame Bovary is arguably the novel that inaugurated the changes that would become ?modernist,? while maintaining many of the features of the nineteenth-century realist novel. We will then move to Edouard Dujardin?s The Bays are Sere, which Joyce referred to as the first novel that used the stream-of-consciousness technique throughout. We will look at the invention of the term (first used by William James), and then examine the first volume of Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson, who was not only the first woman but the first English writer to use the technique. We will read one or two novels by May Sinclair, who used the term to describe Richardson?s accomplishment, and we will also explore the narrative styles of Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen. Finally, we will return to Flaubert?s Temptation of St. Anthony in preparation for a reading of Joyce?s Ulysses, where we will examine how narration began to explode more fully into drama, dramatizing not only the conscious but the unconscious minds of his protagonists (especially in the ?Circe? episode). We will conclude with an episode of Finnegans Wake, where narrative has been dislodged from the individual body, dissolved into the landscape, language, and darkness. Requirements include a one-page essay to be presented orally, and a 15-20 page seminar paper. Shorter response paragraphs may also be required.
- Restriction(s):
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Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
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