The Novel

The novel has been defined as the kind of writing that emerges from "a world from which God has departed" (Lukacs, Theory of the Novel). From this perspective, the theme of the novel is then focused on the individual, as opposed to a whole community, as in epic. Historically, the novel originates in the tension between the world of romance and that of reality, with Cervantes's Don Quijote as its primary instance, and irony is the determining and organizing principle of the novel's form. In our course, we will read a range of novels from early modern Spain and continental Europe; theories of the novel; 19th-century realism; modernist and postmodern experiments, including non-Western examples. Through our readings we will explore what novels are, what they do, how should we read them, and how they mimic experience and constitute a world.