Friday, February 10, 2006
Three types of novels
I just found out that this summer I'm teaching literature again after about a five year hiatus, during which I've been teaching composition. I'm thrilled about the chance. Teaching composition is OK, but it's not my true passion in life. I suppose it was because of this that for about a year I used a textbook titled Literature For Composition in my classes, until the department decided to stop allowing the book as a textbook choice. Oh, bother.
The class I'm teaching is going to be an introduction to fiction class. The primary textbook will be a collection of short stories, but I also want to try to squeeze in a novel or two as well. This is difficult as it's only an eight week course.
In trying to decide which novels to choose, I've been torn between different types of novel. It seems to me there are three main types of novel.
1. The Classic. This is often what one thinks of as a classic, realist novel from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such authors as Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Scott, Dickens, James, Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, and Hemingway would be in this category. This is a good category to include because it gives students a good conception of what a "novel" in an academic context really means. These novels are not terribly interesting from a formal point of view, but they provide a solid basis in good, memorable characters. They are realistic novels.
2. The Lyric. Alongside the standard tradition of the realist novel as conventionally understood is a whole other type. Authors like Sterne, Shelley, Emily Bronte, Melville, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner seem less interested in the standard novel. Instead, they try to initiate something else in their work. These novelists try to tap into the deep underlying passions of their characters. They tend to be more introspective, less interested in evoking a realistic picture of the known world.
3. The Experimental. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is my paradigmatic idea of a lyrical novel. His later works Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake, though, seem to go off in a different direction altogether. Most tweentieth century novelists are working either at the limits of realism or push beyond this limit to try to narrate the unnarratable. This experimentation often happens in the realm of language. Lyrical novelists are often the ones to go in an experimental direction because they are trying to capture a new conception of the world after the breakdown of the dominant paradigm of a European, white, male, middleclass worldview. Threads of experimentations go back to writers such as Sterne and Diderot, but this type of writing is most pronounced in modern masters such as Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Kafka, and Proust. It also surfaces in those known as "postmodern" novelists, such as Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and DeLillo.
This distinction is not a clear-cut one. The latter work by Henry James, for example, could be said to encompass all three categories. It's just a way of understanding three different tendencies in novels.
Ideally I'd like to include all three in my classes, but time restricts what one can include. This summer I think I'm going to use a classical realist novel, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, paired with the experimental Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Diderot. In the past I've overlooked the classic realist novel as my own personal taste extends more to categories two and three, but I think I'm coming to realize this does my students a disfavor as they don't understand what it is the lyrical and experimental type novels are calling into question through their techniques. So this is why I think I'm going to include Austen this time. The last time I taught this class I used Wuthering Heights and DeLillo's White Noise.
Here's a list of novels that I could imagine using in a introduction to fiction type class under the different categories.
1. Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Emma
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
James, Portrait of a Lady
Conrad, Nostromo
2. Sterne, Sentimental Journey
Shelley, Frankenstein
Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Chopin, The Awakening
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Lawrence, Women in Love
3. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
DeLillo, White Noise
Rushdie, Midnight's Children
The class I'm teaching is going to be an introduction to fiction class. The primary textbook will be a collection of short stories, but I also want to try to squeeze in a novel or two as well. This is difficult as it's only an eight week course.
In trying to decide which novels to choose, I've been torn between different types of novel. It seems to me there are three main types of novel.
1. The Classic. This is often what one thinks of as a classic, realist novel from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such authors as Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Scott, Dickens, James, Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, and Hemingway would be in this category. This is a good category to include because it gives students a good conception of what a "novel" in an academic context really means. These novels are not terribly interesting from a formal point of view, but they provide a solid basis in good, memorable characters. They are realistic novels.
2. The Lyric. Alongside the standard tradition of the realist novel as conventionally understood is a whole other type. Authors like Sterne, Shelley, Emily Bronte, Melville, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner seem less interested in the standard novel. Instead, they try to initiate something else in their work. These novelists try to tap into the deep underlying passions of their characters. They tend to be more introspective, less interested in evoking a realistic picture of the known world.
3. The Experimental. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is my paradigmatic idea of a lyrical novel. His later works Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake, though, seem to go off in a different direction altogether. Most tweentieth century novelists are working either at the limits of realism or push beyond this limit to try to narrate the unnarratable. This experimentation often happens in the realm of language. Lyrical novelists are often the ones to go in an experimental direction because they are trying to capture a new conception of the world after the breakdown of the dominant paradigm of a European, white, male, middleclass worldview. Threads of experimentations go back to writers such as Sterne and Diderot, but this type of writing is most pronounced in modern masters such as Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Kafka, and Proust. It also surfaces in those known as "postmodern" novelists, such as Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and DeLillo.
This distinction is not a clear-cut one. The latter work by Henry James, for example, could be said to encompass all three categories. It's just a way of understanding three different tendencies in novels.
Ideally I'd like to include all three in my classes, but time restricts what one can include. This summer I think I'm going to use a classical realist novel, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, paired with the experimental Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Diderot. In the past I've overlooked the classic realist novel as my own personal taste extends more to categories two and three, but I think I'm coming to realize this does my students a disfavor as they don't understand what it is the lyrical and experimental type novels are calling into question through their techniques. So this is why I think I'm going to include Austen this time. The last time I taught this class I used Wuthering Heights and DeLillo's White Noise.
Here's a list of novels that I could imagine using in a introduction to fiction type class under the different categories.
1. Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Emma
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
James, Portrait of a Lady
Conrad, Nostromo
2. Sterne, Sentimental Journey
Shelley, Frankenstein
Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Chopin, The Awakening
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Lawrence, Women in Love
3. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
DeLillo, White Noise
Rushdie, Midnight's Children
