32211
Seminar
SoSe 14: Theories of the Novel
Florian Sedlmeier
Comments
The emergence of the novel as a literary form produces an assessment of this form as infinitely malleable and as being capable of accommodating a broad variety of conventions and perspectives. By consequence, the form is conceived as being best suited to express the sociopolitical condition of modernity with its profound epistemological transformations and their implications for shifting notions of the individual, the community, and the public, among others. Against this broadly conceived backdrop, the seminar looks at various prefaces and classic theories (Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin); but we will also discuss more recent accounts that offer historicized analyses of the conditions of distribution, production, and reception of novels from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. These theoretical readings will be confronted with a selection of about six novels, covering a time span that ranges from the early republic to literary modernism.
Suggested preparatory reading: George Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1916), John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925).
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14 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Wed, 2014-04-16 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-04-23 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-04-30 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-05-07 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-05-14 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-05-21 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-05-28 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-06-04 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-06-11 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-06-18 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-06-25 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-07-02 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-07-09 12:00 - 14:00
Wed, 2014-07-16 12:00 - 14:00