|
|
|
Apr 20, 2024
|
|
ENGL055A PO - Topics in Contemporary Fiction: Impossible NovelsWhen Offered: Last offered spring 2011.
Instructor(s): J. Lethem
Credit: 1.0
The novel is an impossible pursuit, but some are more impossible than others. If, as in the poet Randall Jarrell’s definition, “a novel is a prose narrative of a certain length with something wrong with it” (as it happens, Jarrell wrote those words in an introduction to one of the texts in this class), then the novels on this list – which by their formal strategies or imaginative or verbal excesses defy or complicate the reader’s ability to merely savor vicarious experience – might be called “prose narratives of an unreasonable length with more than a few things wrong with them. Making uncommon demands, they raise the risk/reward quotient for their readers (and, obviously, their authors as well). The worst cases here – Hopscotch, Dhalgren, The Unconsoled – tip into the category of “novel as labyrinth/world/brain”, exchanging nearly all the usual consolations of fiction for the possibility of plunging the reader into an unforgettable experience, even as they beg to go unread or at least unfinished. Letter grade only. (H5, PR)
This courses has been revised for spring 2016.
Add to Portfolio (opens a new window)
|
|
|
