ENGL170R PO - Testamentary Fictions

When Offered: Irregularly
Instructor(s): S. Raff
Credit: 1

How does writing fiction resemble making a will? In this seminar, we examine several nineteenth-century novels that offer a last will and testament as a model for their own operations. These works imagine the novel as a harbinger of the author’s death and a vehicle for literary immortality. Yet they also explore how those who lack literacy, property, or institutional power may leave marks on their environment. Through close study of such works as the anonymous novel The Woman of Colour, Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, we will consider the role of legal instruments in fiction and the feasibility of imposing one’s wishes beyond death. Letter grade only.

Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 1