History & the Novel

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“Historism” was the term used for the first time in 1881 by Karl Werner to name, in Giambattista Vico als Philosoph und gelehrter Forscher, the specific character of Vico’s understanding of history. From Eric Auerbach (“Vico and Aesthetic Historism”) through Isaiah Berlin (Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas) to Roberto Esposito (Pensiero vivente. Origine e attualità della filosofia italiana), the Italian historicist tradition has consistently been studied as a specific answer to the problems emerging from the Enlightenment: universality and individuality; reason and empiricism; law and fact; science and art. This course looks at the dialogue between such historicist tradition and the development of the historical novel as a specific genre and problem in Italian literary historiography.

Syllabus

Topics in Romance Studies: The Novel (RS 790S)

Fall 2015
Wednesday 1:25–3:55Languages 208

Roberto Dainotto
David Bell



Class 1: August 26

Condorcet. “Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind: Tenth Epoch.” Daedalus 133.3 (2004), pp. 65–82.

Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques.
The Turgot Collection: Writings, Speeches, and Letters of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de Laune. Ed. David Gordon. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2011.

Kant, Immanuel. “To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795).”
Perpetual Peace and Other Essays on Politics, History, and Morals. Ed. Ted Humphrey. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. “On Taste.”
Philosophical Writings. Trans. Michael N Forster. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.


Class 2: September 2
Balzac, Honoré de. Lost Illusions. Trans. Kathleen Raine. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print. (read first half)

Auerbach, Erich. “Vico and Aesthetic Historism.”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 8.2 (1949), pp. 110–118.

Lukács, György.
Theory of the Novel. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971.


Class 3: September 9
Balzac, Honoré de.
Lost Illusions. Trans. Kathleen Raine. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print. (read second half)

Lukács, György.
The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.


Class 4: September 16
Manzoni, Alessandro.
The Betrothed. Trans. Bruce Penman. London: Penguin Book, 1072. (read first half)

Sandra Bermann, “Manzoni’s Essay ‘On the Historical Novel’: A Rhetorical Question.” Canadian review of comparative literature 10:1 (1983), pp. 40–53.


Class 5: September 23

Manzoni, Alessandro. The Betrothed. Trans. Bruce Penman. London: Penguin Book, 1072. (read second half)


Class 6: September 30
Stendhal.
The Red and the Black. Trans. Roger Gard. Revised edition. London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2002. Print.

Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. “Epic and the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. 1975. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.


Class 7: October 7
Flaubert, Gustave. Sentimental Education. Ed. Geoffrey Wall. Trans. Robert Baldrick. London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2004.

Culler, Jonathan.
Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. excerpts

Rancière, Jacques. “The Politics of Literature.”
SubStance 103 (33:11, 2004), pp. 10-24.


Class 8: October 14
Zola, Emile. The Beast Within. Ed. & trans. by Roger Whitehouse. London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2008.

Taine, Hippolyte. “Preface.” History of English literature. New York: H. Holt and Company, 1879.


Class 9: October 21
Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time. Vol 6: Time Regained. Trans. Andreas Mayor, Terence Kilmartin, and T.J. Enright. New York: Modern Library, 1999.

Bergson, Henri.
Matter and Memory. excerpts


Class 10: October 28
Pirandello, Luigi. The Young and the Old. Trans. C.K. Scott-Montcrieff. Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2011. (read first half)

Pirandello, Luigi,
On Humor.


Class 11: November

Pirandello, Luigi. The Young and the Old. Trans. C.K. Scott-Montcrieff. Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2011. (read second half)


Class 12: November 11

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Reprint edition. New York: Mariner Books, 1973. Print.

White, Hayden V. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.


Class 13: November 18

Sebald, Winfried Georg.
Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library, 2001. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Trans. Eric Prenowitz.
Diacritics 25:2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 9-63

Requirements

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