WiSe 13/14: Literary and Cultural Theories-T-Linear vs. Serial Narration
Jens Elze
Comments
The trajectory of the narrative sentence proposed by Arthur C. Danto -(1) x is F in t-1; (2) H happens to x in t-2; (3) x is G in t-3 - seems especially indispensable to the Bildungsroman, a narrative form that, like no other, is concerned with the transformation of a protagonist through (un-)learning and experience. In order to arrive at a synthesis (Lukács) or compromise (Moretti) typical of a process of maturation, this narrative sequence must be articulated in a closed syntagma, contained by the teleological temporalities of adulthood and its metonymic (marriage, profession) and allegorical (nationhood) equivalents. Throughout the 19th century, accelerating processes of technological and organisational modernisation and an expanding colonial imperialism have challenged these closed temporalities, wherefore the developmental trajectory of the Bildungsroman and its purportedly naïve realist epistemology have been declared exhausted. In this seminar, we will read carefully a range of transformative texts that still upheld the biographical narrative framework, albeit gradually moving away from its reliance on the linearity of cause and effect, learning and development, and tradition and modernity, as well as from its bourgeois male sujets of realisation to more contested and unstable negotiations of class, gender, and colonial relations. We will also observe how these transitions are performed in a range of formal transformations such as delayed decoding, temporal compression and extension, the simulation of simultaneity, and (only gradually) the manipulation of narrative discourse.
Primary Texts (to be purchased as Penguin Classics editions):
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1901)
Additional reading in cultural semiotics (Lotman), philosophy (Blumenberg, Taylor) and theories of the novel (Blanckenburg, Lukacs, Bakhtin) will ground our weekly discussions and will be made available throughout the course via Blackboard.
The class will be taught in English.
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments