English 60:

The English Novel: Novel Urban Spectacles

Course Texts:

• Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year (1722; Penguin; ISBN 0-14-043015-6)
  
• Fanny Burney, Evelina (1778, Broadview Press; ISBN 1-55111-237-X)
  
• Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860; Broadview, 1551111748) 0-14-043489-5)
  
• Bram Stoker, Dracula (Broadview, 1551111365)
  
• Ian McEwan, Atonement (2003, Knopf; 038572179X).
  
• Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Harvard; 0-67-453839-0)
  
• Michael McKeon, ed. The Theory of the Novel (Johns Hopkins; ISBN 0-80-186397-X)

Reading Ahead: I strongly recommend that you do as much of the reading as is possible before coming to London. Also: There is no need necessarily to bring the book entitled The Theory of the Novel to London. You can if you'd like; but we will use the essays in that book as the basis for the take-home final exam, which I will send to you around mid-August. If you wish to read ahead from that book, you should look at the entries by Watt, Bakhtin, McKeon, and Armstrong, for starters.

Course Description: In this five-week course we'll study the history of the British novel through its representations of Britain's central city, London. We will read five novels in five weeks and will also read a few accounts of the novel's history and characteristics. In addition, we'll visit many of the sites (and sights) that the novels themselves represent, from East London and London Bridge to Greenwich, Tyburn Tree, Sadler's Wells and Vauxhall, Mayfair, Picadilly, and Covent Garden. Our aim will be to understand the symbiotic relationships existing between London and the novel, and to trace how the growth of the former--and its habit of remaking itself into a series of spectacles and shows.

Writing Assignments and Due Dates: During July, you will primarily be keeping a writing journal, which I will read once during the month. In week five, I will be happy to meet with you to discuss which entries you might wish to turn into journal essays for the Journal Project. The Final Exam will be take-home. I'll post it on-line around August 10th or so, and it will be due at the same time as the Journal Project. The Final Exam will ask you to read essays from The Theory of the Novel and to use them as a basis for writing about the novels in the course.

Grading: The Journal project and the Final Exam each are worth half of your grade. Obviously I will downgrade (and, in a few cases upgrade) students based on the quality (as opposed to the quantity) of their participation in our seminars. Both the journal assignment and the final exam are due September 8th, at 4 pm, to my mailbox at 3600 Market Street, Suite 501A.

More on The Journal Project: The set of Journal Essays that you hand in will be very different from the journal that you keep during the five-week term. So, I've made recommendations below for what you should do during term and then how you should revise in August:

• 1. During the term, I recommend that you keep a reading and traveling journal, and that you use it to keep track of your own reflections as you read the course novels and haunt the sites connected with them. I especially recommend that you use the journal as a place where you can make connections between books, sights, courses, and ideas -- as well as where you can make connections between various passages in a novel and analyze them. While you certainly should think about (and even write about) the questions I ask each week about the reading, I'm hoping you'll use the journal to ask your own questions. Certainly for the Journal Project you should not use my questions as the basis for your essays; the point is for you to move beyond those questions to those of your own formulating. At the very least, you should, before and after class, think about the relation between the text's form and its content. What is experimental or almost dogmatically traditional? Why this form? Why not another? But you should also think hard about the relation between the form of these novels and the geographies they inhabit. For example: How is Great Expectations different in technique from Evelina? Do these novels explore different parts of London, or do they represent the same places but in different ways? Or: Often the way literary texts make meaning is through their excesses--what is excessive about the text we're reading for a given week? How are a particular novel's formal and stylistic excesses connected to the issues it explores?
• 2. During the term, alongside these initial notes and impressions, I hope you'll spend an equal amount of time in your journal thinking about London itself as a performance space -- whose architecture, monuments, and many spectacles (from the style of the taxis, mail boxes, and phone booths to the Nelson Monument, Speaker's Corner, or Madame Tussaad's) achieve effects similar to the kind that we perceive in plays or novels. You may also want to think about exactly what London is performing for you. You'll probably want to make your journal an "Urban Spectacle" journal, where you spend time thinking about the relation between what you see and what you read, but also about the poetics and politics of outdoor (and indoor) space. Ideally, your journal should spend as much time thinking about your reading outside of books as inside books.
• 3. During August, you should then pick four fruitful entries in your journal and work them up into no more than four finished, reflective, exploratory "essay-entries" totaling at least 20 pages. Do not be afraid, in the process of revising, to radically rewrite and add to existing material. In fact, you should. It might be that your best ideas might occur after you go back home; you may even get a great idea for an entry after you've left London. Ideally, your entries should not overlap with your final essay, but rather represent to me the work and thinking you've outside of that assignment. Most importantly, your journal essays should be interesting and pleasure to read. It will be up to you to decide what ideas to pursue, but you should avoid having all of your entries resemble one another in scope or approach. For example, thinking through why our novels all focus upon a single part of London is a good idea, but doing four such entries (or even three) would be repetitive. Instead, try to choose four entries that represent both your thinking for the course and your experience of living, reading, and thinking in London over this five-week period.

During July, I'll read through your journals at least once, and make notes to myself so as to keep track of your progress in it. I'll formulate the final grade on the journal based on my notes and on the final version of it. I do this because what I care most about is that you keep your journal while your in London; at the same time, I ask you to select from your journals and write longer, more reflective essays because I want you to keep thinking about the texts and the city during August. So, please don't think it's somehow cheating to reread the materials in August, and to continue writing in your journal about the materials. It might be that some of you will have huge epiphanies about the early plays we read only after you read the gothic dramas with which we'll close the course.


SYLLABUS

Week #1 (June 27, 29): Come to the first meeting having read Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. You should also have completed Roy Porter's London: A Social History, or at least read the chapters that pertain to London between 1640 and 1750. We'll be using this book repeatedly during our five weeks. In addition, I've compiled a considerable amount of additional information regarding this novel at http://www.english.upenn.edu/Undergrad/Courses/Spring02/traffic/unit1.html. Have a look there during May and June if you have on-line access. For this first class, here are some questions I'd like you to think about. Come to class the first meeting with an answer jotted down to at least two of the questions below:

• 1. This is a book written in 1722 that is pretending to be written much earlier. What strategies does it take to convince you of its documentary truth? Think very hard about the myriad of different kinds of belief the narrator addresses, from governmental to religious to economic, etc.
• 2. Think about the answer you gave to #1. Are these same strategies -- how to make it seem "real" -- the fundamental tools of what we call "formal realism"? Can you think of other tools?
• 3. Get out your London A-Z. Does having a map of London as you read help you see things you couldn't see otherwise? How about the Motco maps (see the on-line materials)? How has London changed?

• 1. In what parts of London does this novel take place? Why there and not elsewhere? (use Porter). How is Burney's (and Evelina's) London different from Defoe's?
• 2. What kind of ideal reader is Evelina written for? What kind of effect is the book supposed to have? Where in the text is this most apparent to you?
• 3. Try to imagine how this book asks to be read? In what kind of environment? At what kind of pace? Where in the text is this most apparent to you?
• 4. What kinds of pleasures does the book seek to produce? What kind of readerly desire does it seek to manufacture? Where in the text is this most apparent to you? Put another way, what different kinds of writing or style do you find in the novel?
• 5. Evelina is an epistolary novel, typical of the 18th century novel of Samuel Richardson. If you were writing a novel, how would adopting this form make it more difficult to write? What would be easier? Within the form of a letter, what other kinds of writing (dialogue for example?) are possible or not possible?
• 6. Think especially about your own London travel journal. What connections between art and culture does Evelina make? What are you doing the same or differently?

• 1. In what parts of London does this novel take place? Why there and not elsewhere? (use Porter).
• 2. Again, who is the implied, ideal reader of this text? (Contrast, if you wish, to Defoe and Burney).
• 3. Again, what kinds of effects--both pleasure and suspense--does this text seek to produce? (Contrast, if you wish, to Defoe and Burney).
• 4. If you map out what basic acts are moral and immoral in this book, can you derive from this list a systematic moral universe in this novel? Is there a politics of class, gender, or power underlying this moral universe?
• 5. What is the relation between Pip the narrator and Pip the character?

Week #5 (July 25, 27): Read Ian McEwan, Atonement, and if possible read parts of it aloud to yourself. What happens to the pace of the novel when you do this? If you did not go on the Dickens walk with us, then you must go this week to St. Paul's and to explore the area around it, particularly St. Bride's (on the Strand) and the exhibit in the basement. You'll see how the entire area around St. Paul's was completely leveled during the Blitz, and the cathedral survived only because of hundreds of the volunteers. Questions: What is different about this book's style and formal characteristics? What is the author's attitude toward authorship? What do you make of its episodic quality? and the relation between this structure and its views on authorship and atonement that come near the end of the book?