Instructor: N. Dames
Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. (Seminar). An examination of the realist novel in its major period (1720-1900) and the origins of the realist vision. What constitutes “the real,” and for what purposes is “realism” employed? What understandings of science, and what kinds of political or social aspirations, underwrote the attempt to give narrative art the qualities of accuracy, transparency, contemporaneity, even evidentiary value? Novelists to include Defoe, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Eliot, Gissing; major critical and theoretical statements by the Goncourts, Maupassant, James, Auerbach, Lukács, Barthes, Jameson, and others.
