The Novel and its “Literary Wisdom”
Professor Gordana P. Crnković
COMP LIT 570 A, Novel: Theory and Practice
SLAV 490 A, Studies in Slavic Literature
Course Description:
This is an upper-level undergraduate and graduate seminar, open to juniors, seniors, and graduate students from all disciplines and majors.
Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s claim that relations between people cannot be governed by general rules and theories, but only worked out differently in each specific situation with the help of what Bakhtin calls “literary wisdom,” this course looks at the ways in which the “literary wisdom” of a few very well-known novels from different eras, historical and social environments of western or eastern Europe might inform and impact contemporary readers’ view of relationships among people, as well as those between people and animals and plants. We will read and discuss Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (UK, 1813), Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (original Czech language publication in 1985), and Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude (Czechoslovakia, 1976). Our readings of the novels will be supplemented with some literary theory and criticism (on Canvas and through lectures), including brief selections from works by classics of literary theory and criticism (Mikhail Bakhtin, Northrop Frye, Erich Auerbach), philosopher Martha Nussbaum, contemporary critics such as Terry Eagleton, and short texts on the practice of literary criticism by the fiction authors themselves (Kiš, Gombrowicz, Nabokov, and Lem).