Course Number: ENG 388
Professor: Bill McBride
Credit Hours: 3
Meeting Time: Thursday 5:30-8:20
20th Century Novel
ENG 388
Professor Bill McBride
Meeting Place: STV 101
Office/Hours:
Williams 208/T & R 3:30-4:30 pm
Office Phone 438-7998
WebBoard
20th Century Novel, Film
& Theory
It
is the weekly responsibility of each student
1) to have closely read in advance
the novel scheduled,
2) prepare an analysis of a
selected passage,
3) present analysis when called
upon
Weekly posts
must be made by
SATURDAY
11:59 pm
to insure proper credit
OFFICE
Williams
208
HOURS 1:30-2:30
p
Tuesday
& Thursday
Voice:
309 438 7998
E-mail
me
REQUIRED TEXTS:
Novels
Kafka. In der Strafkolonie/In the Penal Colony 1901/Die
Verwandlung/Metamorphosis
1915.
Proust. Du Cote de Chez Swann/Swann's Way 1913
Lawrence. Sons and Lovers 1913
Joyce. Ulysses 1922
Miller. The Tropic of Cancer 1934
Greene. The Power and the Glory 1940
Hemingway. The Garden of Eden [1946-61] 1986
Beckett. Molloy [1951] 1955
Lessing. The Golden Notebook. 1962
Garcia-Marquez. Cien anos de soledad [1967]/100 Years of Solitude.
1970
Fowles. The French Lieutenant’s Woman 1969
Palahniuk Fight Club 1996
Films
Un amour de Swann
(Schlöndorff
1984) 
Sons and Lovers
(Cardiff 1960)
Ulysses (Strick 1967)
The Fugitive [The Power
and the Glory] (Ford 1947)
Not I (Beckett/Davis
1977)
The French Lieutenant’s
Woman (Reisz 1981)
Fight Club (Fincher
1999)
Theory of the Novel
Nancy Armstrong, Eric Auerbach, M. M. Bakhtin, Mieke Bal, Roland Barthes, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, Maurice Blanchot, Bertold Brecht, Wayne Booth, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Paul deMan, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Leslie Fiedler, E.M. Forster, Sigmund Freud, Northrope Frye, Gerard Genette, Rene Girard, Barbara Hernstein Smith, Roman Ingarden, Wolfgang Iser, Henry James, Frederic Jameson, Susan S. Lanser, Juri Lotman, Georg Lukacs, Franco Moretti, Paul Ricoeur, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eve Sedgwick, Viktor Shklovsky, Tzvetan Todorov, Boris Tomashevsky, Ian Watt, Virginia Woolf
COURSE DESCRIPTION
A dialectical approach toward genre study based on the proposition that a powerfully descriptive taxonomy can be achieved by comparing, in this case, the English novel with other European and American iterations, and further, one narrative form, the novel, with another, film. To that end, for example, witness playwright Harold Pinter’s alchemical screenplay of John Fowles’ novel for the film by Karel Reisz. We will attempt close readings of the novels distanced by historicized theoretical interventions courtesy of Marxist, Deconstructionist, Naratologist, Psychoanalyitcal, anti-Freudian, Queer, Formalist, New Historicist, Feminist, Aesthecist, Phenomenological, Structuralist, Postmodernist, New Critical perspectives. Look for guest lectures by Curt White (Graham Greene), Hilary Justice (Hemingway) and other speakers TBA.
COURSE FORMAT
1. Students post weekly responses to readings/lectures/screenings/discussion via
webboard.
2. In-class presentation/critique of either one of the novels or theoretical
texts.
3. A written proposal of the final research project.
4. A final research paper (with an eye toward publication) of 12-15pp for
undergraduates and 18-20 pp. for graduate students.
Grade evaluation will be determined by satisfying #s 1-3 and the student's ability to synthesize one or more of the theoretical approaches presented in readings and lectures, and apply such a perspective to a cultural "text" or "site" in a well-written, coherent final essay.