Syllabus
Tuesday, September 3
Readings: Callistratus, Descriptions (3rd century CE), trans. A. Fairbanks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1931), pp. 395ff, 419ff (pdf);
Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jealousy (1957), trans. Richard Howard, (New York: Grove Press, 1959), pp. 7-12 (pdf).
DESCRIPTION, QUEST ROMANCE, & ALLEGORY
Thursday, September 5
Readings: Chretien de Troyes, Yvain/ Le chevalier au lion (12th century), pp. 295-328 (pdf);
Michel Beaujour, "Some Paradoxes of Description," Yale French Studies, vol. 61 (1981). pp 27-59 (JStor).
Tuesday, September 10
Readings: Chretien de Troyes, Yvain/ Le chevalier au lion (12th century), pp. 329-380 (pdf).
Silke Horstkotte, “Ekphrasis as Genre, Ekphrasis as Metaphenomenology,” (sections 2 & 4) in Literary Visualities: Visual Descriptions, Readerly Visualisations, Textual Visibilities (Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, Inc, 2017), pp. 127-137 and 142-144. (library EBook only).
DESCRIPTION & FICTIONS of ETHNOGRAPHY
Thursday, September 12
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Preface and Chapters 1-11 (pp 33-136);
Mieke Bal, Narratology, An Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, pp.18-48, with special emphasis on pages 47 and top of 48 (reserve).
Tuesday, September 17
Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Chapters 12-26 (pp. 136-270)
Bakhtin,The Dialogic Imagination: four essays, (UTexas, 1981) pp. 119-120 and pp. 181-202 (hard copy pages are 84-85 and 146-166), (E-Book: full text available)
Thursday, September 19
Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, Chapters 27-Appendix
Bakhtin,The Dialogic Imagination: four essays, (UTexas, 1981) pp. 259-273 (hard copy pages are 224-236), (E-Book: full text available).
DESCRIPTION, REVOLUTION & the MEDIA
Tuesday, September 24
Gustave Flaubert, A Sentimental Education (1869), Part 1 (pp 5-109).
J. Mitchell, "What is an Image?" inIconology: Image, Text, Ideology,pp. 7-46 (reserve).
Thursday, September 26
Flaubert, A Sentimental Education, Part 2, Chapters 1-2, (pp. 113-183).
Roland Barthes, "The Reality Effect" in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of California Press) pp. 141-148 (pdf).
Tuesday, October 1
Flaubert, A Sentimental Education, Part 2, Chapter 3 – Part 3, Chapter 5, (pp 184-365).
Michel Riffaterre, “Descriptive Imagery" in Yale French Studies, vol. 61 (1981), p. 107-125 (JStor).
Thursday, October 3
Flaubert, A Sentimental Education, Part 3, Chapter 5-end (pp 366-460).
Colin Campbell, “The Generation of Longing” and “The Spirit of Modern Consumerism” in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) pp. 85-95 (pdf)
DESCRIPTION, LABOR, LANDSCAPE & GENRE
Tuesday, October 8
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, (1891) PHASE 1-2 (pp 13-114);
Elaine Scarry, “On Vivacity,” “On Solidity,” and “On the Place of Instruction” in Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), pp 3-39 (reserve).
Thursday, October 10
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, PHASE 3 (pp 115-168);
Elaine Scarry, “Work and Body in Hardy and other 19th C. Novelists” in Representations, vol. 3, 1983, pp. 90-123 (JStor).
Tuesday, October 15
Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, PHASE 4-6 (pp 169-386);
James Krasner, The Edges of Sunlight: Visual Selection in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (1992), pp. 73-107 (reserve).
Thursday, October 17
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, PHASE 7 (pp 387-420).
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “The Lighting Design of Hardy's Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 64, No. 1 (June 2009), pp. 48-75 (JSTOR)
FALL BREAK, OCTOBER 19-27
DESCRIPTION & the ROMANCE of COMMODITY CAPITALISM
Tuesday, October 29
Emile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise/ Au Bonheur des Dames (serialized publication in France, 1882; first English translation 1883), read introduction by Brian Nelson; read Chapters 1-7, with emphasis on Chapters 3-7 (pp 59-207).
Rosalind Williams, Dream Worlds, chap 3. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp 58-94 and 104-106. (reserve).
Thursday, October 31
Emile Zola, The Ladies' Paradise/ Au Bonheur des Dames, read Chapters 8-14, with emphasis on Chapters 10-14 (pp 270-432);
Rachel Bowlby, “Traffic in her Desires: Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames” in “Just Looking”: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. Taylor & Francis Group. 2009. (pp. 40-50) (ebook Reed library)
DESCRIPTION, MOCK EPIC & EMPIRE
Tuesday, November 5
Virginia Woolf, The Waves (1931) (Harcourt and Brace, 1959), pp 7-107
Klitgard, “The Interludes” in On the Horizon: A Poetics of the Sublime in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (Academica Press, 2004), pp. 137-157 (pdf).
Thursday, November 7
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, pp 108-235
Dora Zhang, “Naming the Indescribable: Woolf, Russell, James, and the Limits of Description” in New Literary History, Winter 2014, 45:1, pp 51-70 (pdf).
Tuesday, November 12
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, pp 236-297
Paul Ricoeur, “Narrative Time” in Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1, 1980 (JStor).
DESCRIPTION, EMBODIMENT & EMPATHY
Thursday, November 14
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing (New York: Scribner, 2017), pp 1-90;
Yesmina Khedhir, “Ghosts Tell Stories: Cultural Haunting” (pdf).
Tuesday, November 19
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing, pp 91-168;
Ellen Esrock, The Reader’s Eye, Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994), pp. 151-205 (reserve).
Thursday, November 21
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing, pp 169-285.
Joanne Chassot, “Tracing the Ghost” in Ghosts of the African Diaspora (Dartmouth College Press, 2018) pp. 4-29. (pdf)
DESCRIPTION & ECOLOGICAL ENTANGLEMENT
Tuesday, November 26
Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, prologue, Chapters 1-2 pp. 1-61
Lawrence Buell, “What is the Environmental Imagination” (JSTOR) and “Representing the Environment” (JSTOR) in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, (pp 6-8 and 83-98)
THANKSGIVING
Tuesday, December 3
Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, Chapters 3-5 pp. 62-128.
Julie Branch Rogers, “Seven Steeples’s Layered Storyworld” in De-centered and embraced: the Reunion of Character and Setting (Reed thesis, 2024) Chapter 3, pp 31-49 (pdf)
Thursday, December 5
Sara Baume, Seven Steeples, Chapters 6-epilogue pp. 129-180.
Timothy Baker, “Gleaning, storytelling and constellations” in New Forms of Environmental Writing: Gleaning and Fragmentation (pp 11-34 + notes) and “Conclusion: “Particle sings to Particle” (pdf)
Tuesday, December 10
Final EXAM: You will perform a reading from any one of the novels read this semester for the conference, explaining why you have made the selection you did in light of the questions for the course.
Texts
The primary texts for this course are available on 2 hour reserve at the library and for sale at the bookstore. Please buy these editions—having the same page numbers greatly facilitates close reading in conference. Secondary texts will either be handed out as xeroxes, available as links to pdfs. or available online through the Reed library.
Keep in mind that secondary texts are chosen primarily for their theoretical interest and may not address the primary texts explicitly. The secondary readings are not intended to “explain” the primary texts but rather to provoke your own critical and theoretical thinking. You will need to speculate actively both about how a particular theorist would read the primary text and also about what literary phenomena you have observed that the theorist does not or could not account for. This is an open invitation to create and articulate literary theory of your own.
Written Assignments
There are 6 kinds of assignments, which you will cycle through, writing one assignment every other week. The cycle will start with different assignments for different students. Where your cycle starts will be determined by the place you choose on a sign-up sheet on the first day of class. Each student will write a total of 6 assignments over the course of the semester. You must e-mail me your written assignments as a google doc. no later than NOON on the day they are due. You will present all written assignments orally in conference. Late assignments are accepted only in case of documented medical emergency.
Assignment 1: a synopsis of the theoretical reading in no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 bullet points (300 words max).
Assignment 2: a critique of the most and least compelling claims in the theoretical reading in no fewer than 3 and no more than 6 bullet points (300 words max).
Assignment 3: a close reading of a most significant single paragraph from literary reading (500 words max).
Assignment 4: an explication of the most significant paragraph from the theoretical reading (500 words max).
Assignment 5: a 4-page creative emulation of the literary reading and a 1-page “Artist’s Statement” in which you describe the elements of the text you are emulating
OR a 5-page paper that includes three elements: a close reading of a descriptive paragraph of your choice; an argument about how this passage is related to the text as a whole; and finally, an account of how your argument is related to one of the theoretical ideas put forward in the secondary reading. The passages from both the text and the theory you have chosen to work with must appear at the head of the paper, single-spaced. The order in which you choose to arrange the required elements of a paper is up to you.
Assignment 6: a 4-page creative emulation of the literary reading and a 1-page “Artist’s Statement” in which you describe the elements of the text you are emulating
OR a paper (5 pages) that compares the descriptive strategies in specific paragraphs taken from 2 of our primary texts. What do these passages choose to describe and why? What aspects of what is described are emphasized or ignored? How does the diction of the description draw attention to the material, metonymical or allegorical qualities of what is described? In what ways do the descriptions sustain, diverge from or complicate the narrative?
Participation
Active participation in all conference discussions is required. Prepare an observation or a question about the assigned texts in advance of every conference. Missing more than 3 conferences during the semester may result in failure to pass the course. Those diagnosed with Covid will be excused from conference for 2 weeks and will be allowed extra time for writing assignments if necessary.