ENG 230a: Realism
Spring 2017
Mondays 2-4:50pm
Professor Ulka Anjaria
Office: Rabb 239
Phone: (781) 736-2162
Email:
Office Hours: Wednesdays 12-2pm, Rabb 239
A seemingly outdated term often associated with a naïve past in which writers and readers believed in literature’s ability to reflect social realities, realism is much decried by modernists, postmodernists, critical theorists, postcolonialists and scholars of contemporary literature alike. However, this disdain for realism often relies upon a misreading of what realism is and does. This course will provide the critical tools to enable a rethinking of realism from a number of theoretical angles. Beginning with a close investigation of 19th-century bourgeois realisms, we will then engage intensively with the realism-naturalism debate through the foundational critical works of Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács. We will study the relationship of realism to modernism by looking at several literary experiments with realism. We will end the class by tracing out some of the possible paths for the future of realist studies.
Course requirements:
1) Attendance is required. You must make up the material for any classes you miss. This class meets only 13 times over the course of the semester. One missed meeting means you have missed a significant portion of the work.
2) Participation. This is a graduate-level seminar and it is expected that you will be fully engaged with the course texts at each session. All students are expected to participate in class discussion, which includes commenting on the texts, asking intelligent questions, and pushing the discussion forward. If you are shy about speaking up in a class context, please come speak to me during office hours.
3) LATTE. We will use LATTE in this class to think through our texts and what are at times difficult theoretical questions. I see LATTE asa space where important work takes place before the class session. Feel free to ask questions on LATTE or raise topics you don’t fully understand. We should come to class with our brains already in motion. Please post every week before class, and see these postings as part of your engagement with the course readings. The only exception is the March 25 special class, when I’d like you to post after class, engaging with both the readings and the seminar discussion.
4) Final Paper. The final paper will involve working through one or more of the ideas developed in this course in relation to your scholarly interests. Students are encouraged to meet with me to discuss ideas for the final paper around halfway through the semester. The final paper should be 12-15 pages in length.
Course books (available at Brandeis bookstore)
Alex Woloch, The One vs the Many
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
Georg Lukács, Studies in European Realism
Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot
George Eliot, Felix Holt
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
Emile Zola, Germinal
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Alex Woloch, Or Orwell
Richard Wright, Native Son
Special issue of Modern Language Quarterly on “Peripheral Realisms”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Americanah
All other course materials will be available as PDFs online.
Prologue: The problem.
January 23-
Homi Bhabha, “Representation and the Colonial Text” (pp. 93-109) (L)
Simon Gikandi, “Preface: Modernism in the World” (L)
Zadie Smith, “Two Paths for the Novel” (L)
James Wood, “Beyond a Boundary” (L)
James Wood, “Human, All Too Inhuman” (L)
Eli Park Sorensen, “Realism as Straw Man” (L)
Joe Cleary, “Realism after Modernism” (MLQ)
I. Bourgeois realisms.
January 30-
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus’s Scar,” from Mimesis(L)
George Levine, chs. 1 and 2, The Realistic Imagination (L)
Alex Woloch, intro and ch. 1, The One vs. the Many
February 6 -
Honoré de Balzac, Le Père Goriot (1835)
Erich Auerbach, “In the Hotel de la Môle” (pp. 468-492) from Mimesis (L)
George Lukács, “Preface” and pp. 40-46, Studies in European Realism
Fredric Jameson, Antinomies of Realism, intro and ch.2 (L)
Alex Woloch, ch. 4, The One vs. the Many
February 13-
George Eliot, Felix Holt (1866)
George Levine, “George Eliot and the art of realism” (L)
George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (pp. 252-274) (L)
Catherine Gallagher, “The Failure of Realism: Felix Holt” (L)
February 20- NO CLASS
February 27-
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters (2002)
Crash (dir. Paul Haggis, 2004)
George Lukács, “Narrate or Describe?” (L)
Eli Park Sorensen, “Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry” (L)
II. Experimental realisms.
March 6-
Lukács, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism,” Studies in European Realism
Lukács, “Marx and Engels on Aesthetics” (L)
Eli Park Sorensen, “Lukács’s theory of the novel” (L)
Jed Esty, “Global Lukács” (L)
Ulka Anjaria, “Realism in the Colony” (pp. 1-24) (L)
March 13-
Emile Zola, Germinal(1885)
Lukács, “The Zola Centenary,” Studies in European Realism
Emile Zola, “The Experimental Novel” (pp. 6-54) (L)
Toril Moi, Henrik Ibsen and the Birth of Modernism, ch. 3 (L)
March 20-
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
Alex Woloch, Or Orwell, intro and chs. 1-3
March 25 (Saturday)-
Special Class: Workshop on Cross-Cultural Realisms
Reading TBA.
Please submit LATTE post after the seminar, reflecting on both the readings and the seminar.
March 27- NO CLASS (Rescheduled to March 25)
April 3-
Richard Wright, Native Son(1940)
Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Literature” (L)
Richard Wright,“How Bigger Was Born” (L)
Stacy Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American Art and Literature, ch. 1 and ch. 5(pp. 239-254) (L)
April 10- NO CLASS
April 17- NO CLASS
III. Realist futures.
April 19 (Brandeis Monday)-
Season 2, The Wire (dir., David Simon, 2003)
Fredric Jameson, “Realism and Utopia in The Wire” (L)
April 24-
Fruitvale Station (dir., Ryan Coogler, 2013)
Special issue of MLQ 73.3(2012) on “Peripheral Realisms” (all articles except Wills)
April 28-
(Optional) Brandeis Novel Symposium event
May 1-
Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, Americanah (2013)
Ian Baucom, “A Study in African Realism” (L)
Ramón Saldívar, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction” (L)
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