Syllabus: Course description
This is a senior seminar, with enrollment restricted
to Literature majors, in which we will—in short—read really
long books. This is something the quarter system (and, one might argue,
the condition of literature at the present time) generally doesn’t
allow us to do. While there are many ways to make a novel lengthy, we
will focus here on the subgenre of the encyclopedic novel, in which plot
and character development take a back seat to digression, rumination,
and non-linear information transfer.
Although it has roots reaching back to the earliest novels of the Renaissance
(Cervantes’s Don Quijote, Rabelais’s Gargantua et Pantagruel),
the tradition of the encyclopedic novel begins, by most accounts, in the
U.S., with Melville’s Moby-Dick. Written in 1850-51, a time of both
unprecedented national expansion and looming civil war, this novel veers
away so thoroughly from its initial plot that those divergences and digressions
become ultimately more significant than the story itself. Although Moby-Dick
was received at the time with nearly universal puzzlement, later novelists
found its form (or anti-form) to be an appropriate vehicle for expressing
what they experienced as the de-centered, heterogeneous reality of modern
life.
The encyclopedic urge has been crucial for twentieth-century world literature,
from foundational works like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Julio Cortázar’s
Rayuela (Hopscotch) to such recent examples as Umberto Eco’s Il
pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum), Georges Perec’s
La Vie: mode d'emploi (Life: A User’s Manual), and Orhan Pamuk’s
Kara Kitap (The Black Book). In the U.S., too, the influence of Thomas
Pynchon’s encyclopedic novels (Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland,
Mason & Dixon) remains potent, as the recent commercial success of
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest indicates. As one might notice
from this list, however, few women writers seem to produce texts that
fall within the encyclopedic-novel tradition. We’ll therefore examine
one exception to this tendency, and pursue a feminist perspective on our
readings in general.
We will read three novels, all available at the Literary
Guillotine, 204 Locust St. downtown:
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; Norton Critical Edition, paperback)
Annie Proulx, Accordion Crimes (1996; Scribner, paperback)
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006; Penguin Press, hardcover)
For the sake of continuity in class discussions and the ease of referring to its footnotes, please purchase the Norton Critical Edition of Moby-Dick. Owing to discrepancies between the versions originally published in London and New York, other editions may have different text as well as different pagination.
There is also a short Course Reader available for purchase at the UCSC
Bookstore that contains secondary critical readings.