ENGL 657 Calendar
NB: This is provisional, and I’ll be adding links to supplemental readings, adding and deleting supplemental readings, and fleshing out the assignment into, etc.
Week 1, Jan 21
Please read and bring to class the following pieces, which will be emailed to you in advance of the first meeting:
Ian Watt, “Realism and the Novel Form” from The Rise of the Novel
Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect”
Week 2, Jan 28
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811), Volume I and II, 1-191
Walter Scott, from “The Journal of Sir Walter Scott” (1826)
Scott, from “The Quarterly Review” (1815)
George Levine, “Realism” from The Realistic Imagination (1981), 3-22
Week 3, Feb 4
Austen, cont., Volume III, 193-end
Alex Woloch, from The One vs. the Many
Rae Greiner, from Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
Week 4, Feb 11
Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot (1835), 1-126 (parts 1 and 2)
Balzac, “General Preface” (1842)
Erich Auerbach, from Mimesis
Week 5, Feb 18
First Post due by noon
Balzac, cont., 127-217 (parts 3 and 4)
Carlo Ginzburg, “Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance”
Lilian Furst, from All Is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction
Week 6, Feb 25
Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, The Jew’s Beech Tree
Friday, February 27, short assignment due by midnight
Week 7, Mar 4
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856), parts one and two, pp. 1-204
Week 8, Mar 11
Meet in the library (room tbd) for a research methods workshop led by Ms. Rachel Arteaga, from the Merriam Library. This will be most useful to you if you bring ideas—even vague ones—for a project topic
Spring Break
Week 9, Mar 25
Flaubert, cont., 205-311 (end)
Fredric Jameson, “The Realist Floor-Plan”
Hans Robert Jauss, from An Aesthetics of Reception
Week 10, Apr 1
Second Post due by noon
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72), 1-499 (books 1-5)
Week 11, Apr 8
Eliot, cont., 503-785 (books 6-8)
Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian”
Week 12, Apr 15
Émile Zola, Nana (1880), 19-241 (chapters 1-7)
Zola, “Preface” to Thérèse Raquin (1867) [Read “Preface to the Second French Edition”]
Zola, The Experimental Novel (1880)
Week 13, Apr 22
Week 14, Apr 29
Zola, cont., 242-470 (chapters 8-end)
Christopher Hill, “Nana in the World”
Annotated bibliography due by midnight Friday May 1
Week 15, May 6
Third and final Post due by noon
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying”
Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction”
David Shields, from Reality Hunger
Week 16: Finals Week: May 13
Final Paper Due on Wednesday of Finals Week
Be prepared to briefly present your work to the class. After all have presented, we’ll have a final discussion about how our projects have addressed the problem of realism. In other words: Show up, bring your work, and we’ll chat! Email papers to me before the start of class.
Geoff Baker 
I suppose with the cancellation of class and being bogged down with multiple papers from all my seminars, the third post has evidently slipped my mind, but judging from the home page of this website, I appear to not be the only person that forgot? I found some of the ideas from Wilde and Woolf to be compelling. Especially Woolf’s idea of the mind being reality—and her bold claim that Joyce is more of realist than any of those other novelists. Although this is of course true—that reality exists inside (and perhaps this is the only certain reality), but I would contend that the world outside of our own minds is also worthy of examination—and while the realists were concerned with the world outside of the mind, and the modernists were concerned with the inside of the mind, it seems to me that a literary depiction of reality would a balance between the two. The world affects the mind and the mind interprets the world. They seem to constantly be informing each other and imposing on each other—as if to say that without the mind the world would not exist to our own individual perception, and without the world the mind would have no ground on which to stand. They are interrelated and reliant on each other.
It has always fascinated me that the mind can be so elusive when it is readily available. How has philosophy been so unable to define man? All the information we need is within our own experience. It is remarkable that this experience, ever-present and right at our doorstep, remains undefinable and mysterious. And the world as well!—the world is ever-present to our experience and examination, so how is it that these two elements are so mysterious to us? It seems that realist literature should seek to answer these questions. Ultimately the world and the mind coexist, and the extremism of both the realists and the modernists must find a medium. Perhaps this is the next step for literature: examining how the world imposes itself on the mind, and how the mind devours the world with experience and curiosity. I think I’ll have my poetry aim for that.
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