01:30 PM to 02:45 PM MW
Thompson Hall 2022
Section Information for Spring 2019
The nineteenth century was a golden age for fiction. Lacking movies or TV, people often read novels aloud to each other in the evenings and waited impatiently for next month’s installment. The result was more fine novels than any one course could hope to cover. This course will focus on fiction in translation from Goethe to Tolstoy, with novels originally written in German, French, and Russian.
The course begins with a novel of manners in the style of Jane Austen, Goethe's mysterious and thought-provoking Elective Affinities. We then turn to the triumph of the realistic novel in France and Russia, as shown by Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. The Tolstoy readings will be organized so that students can experience how this masterpiece came out in serial form over a period of three years. The course ends with shorter works, starting with a rural novel by George Sand, France’s leading woman writer of the time. The stories “A Simple Heart” and “Herodias” by Flaubert and Dostoevsky’s short novel The Gambler round off the course and anticipate aspects of the modern fiction in the twentieth century.
Classes will mix lectures and discussion. Written work includes several in-class and take-home exercises on the readings, a short course paper, and a final exam.
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Credits: 3
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