ENGLISH 90LV: Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf

Jump to Today

Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf (ENGL 90lv), Spring 2024

Instructor: James Wood (wood2@fas.harvard.edu). 

Date and location: Mondays, 3.45pm-5.45pm,  Location TBD

Requirements: attendance and participation in seminar, and two essays (one mid-term essay of 3-5 pages; one final essay of 6-9 pages).

In this seminar, we’ll be looking at the ways in which a range of writers represent the mind on the page: the mind at thought, in agitation, at rest, at prayer, in distress, in rebellion, and just doing nothing (or apparently nothing). This examination allows us to scrutinize just over a hundred years of novelistic development and experiment – from 1813 to 1927, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf – a period that might rightly be considered the high-point of the novel’s rise. We will discover that as the novelistic treatment of consciousness changes, so the idea of what a mind (or a self) is, also changes: the form (the means of representation) modifies the content (what is represented). What might seem at first like a fairly small thing – a question of novelistic technique – will turn out to have massive and far-reaching consequences for our sense of self.

 

Enrollment will be about 20 students, with some preference given to English or literature concentrators (or students doing a secondary in English), and some preference given to seniors (since younger students can re-apply). Those keen to take the class should write to me at wood2@fas.harvard.edu, and tell me about their interests in the class, and in the novel. By all means attach previous essays or pieces of creative writing to the email! Bits of music or painting, even!

 

Syllabus

  1. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice(Penguin Classics, intro. by Tony Tanner) 1813
  2. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary(Penguin Classics, trans. Geoffrey Wall), 1857
  3. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground(Vintage, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky), 1864
  4. Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich(Vintage Classics, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky), 1886.
  5. Anton Chekhov, Stories(Bantam, trans. Pevear and Volokhonsky), 1890-1904
  6. Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest(Penguin Classics, trans. Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers), 1895
  7. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse(Harcourt, intro by Eudora Welty), 1927

 

Course policies

Class times: This class meets from 3.45pm-5.45pm once a week, on Mondays.

Requirements: weekly attendance, a mid-term paper of 3-6 pages, and a final paper of 6-9 pages. In addition, I hope students will speak to me as often as they would like to, in real office hours or virtual ones. Should students need extensions for essays, or be unable to attend a class, they should let me know well in advance. In general, I want to create an environment in which students feel utterly free to talk to me about any particular difficulty they are having with the class; in these hard times, this seems the least one can do as a professor. 

Books: I know that it may be hard to find the exact versions of the books on this syllabus. But please try to do so, because I’ll be making references to these specific editions, and we’ll be reading out passages from these editions in class; it’s especially important that we read the same translations (as you know, translations often differ from each other quite sharply). All the books on the syllabus, with the exception of the Tolstoy, are available at the Coop. I greatly prefer actual books to digital versions. If any of you are having problems finding the right books, let me know and I’ll make my best effort to get you a copy of the right one. Students who are having financial difficulties buying these books (though I have chosen fairly cheap standard paperbacks) should let me know: I tend to have quite a number lying around at home. (Also, please bring these books – and not your laptops – to every class. I want to see your faces looking at me, and your faces looking down at these wonderful texts, not your faces hidden by laptops!)

 

Accessibility:  If you have any accessibility issue, please contact Harvard’s Accessibility Services Accessibility@dcemail.harvard.edu or 617-998-9640. Accommodations will be made according to the instructions from the Accessibility Services. 

 

Academic Integrity:  You are responsible for reviewing the Harvard Guide to Using Sources, prepared by the Harvard College Writing Program: http://usingsources.fas.harvard.edu. You must not present under your name any work that was not done by you. You must not cite others’ work verbatim without quotation marks around the cited passages and proper citation of your source. Any collaborative work you do on an assignment must be approved by me or your teaching fellow. Also, you must not present work in this course that you have already presented in another course. 

 

The Harvard College Honor Code:

Members of the Harvard College community commit themselves to producing academic work of integrity – that is, work that adheres to the scholarly and intellectual standards of accurate attribution of sources, appropriate collection and use of data, and transparent acknowledgement of the contribution of others to their ideas, discoveries, interpretations, and conclusions. Cheating on exams or problem sets, plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own, falsifying data, or any other instance of academic dishonesty violates the standards of our community, as well as the standards of the wider world of learning and affairs. 

Schedule 

Mon Sep. 9th:  Pride and Prejudice, Volume 1

Mon Sep. 16th:  Pride and Prejudice, Volumes 2 and 3

Mon Sep. 23rd: Madame Bovary, pp. 1-161

Mon Feb. Sep. 30th: Madame Bovary, pp.161-end.

Mon Oct. 7th: Madame Bovary (conclusion)

Mon October 14th: NO CLASS (PUBLIC HOLIDAY)

Mon Oct. 21st: Notes from Underground

Mon Oct. 28th: Effi Briest, pp.1-121

Mon Nov 4th: Effi Briest, pp.121-end

Mon Nov 11th: Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Mon Nov 18th: Chekhov stories: “The Lady with the Little Dog”, “Gusev,” “The Bishop”, “Rothschild’s Fiddle.”

Mon Nov 25th: To the Lighthouse, part 1

Mon Dec 2nd: To the Lighthouse, part 2

  • END• 

 

Course Summary:

Date Details Due