Geological time & Humanism

1. Geological time & Humanism The Drowned World

3. Is novel form always “anthropocentric”? • “Characters” vs. ACTANTS (anything that can perform action) • “Consciousness” • Free indirect discourse • “Stream of consciousness” • Etc etc.

4. Form and Narrative: The Stakes • Novels as Tacit Claims of How History Happens • Developmental History (“Progress!”) • Cyclical History (“It all comes back”) • History as Decline (“The world isn’t what it used to be”) Possible Political Stakes of These Models of History? • Developmental (“Whig”: Progressive?) • Cyclical (Quietist?) • Decline (“Tory”: Conservative?) To be discussed later…

5. Bildungsroman: Dickens • “Formation Novel” – Prototype of development stories • National “coming of age” story – one representative character • Subject = Nation? • Johanne Von Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther (1790s) • Great Expectations, David Copperfield (1850s) • Kunstlerroman: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) • Child  Adolescent  Adult • Typically Retrospective Adult (“Now”) Child (“Then”)

6. National Marriage Plot • Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) • Romance of National Consolidation: two representative characters • Margaret – Southern England, Agrarian, “Pre-Modern,” Anglican, “Classy,” Bookish, Philanthropic. (But also superstitious: “Burning cats!”) OLD ENGLAND • Mr. Thornton – From Manchester (North), Mercantilist, “New Money,” Reformist, Rich (But also crass: bad table manners, and doesn’t read any literature) MODERN ENGLAND • “And yet, yo’ see, North and South has both met and made kind o’ friends in this big smoky place” (73) }

7. The Historical Novel Waverly dreams of his dead Scottish friends: “These reveries he was permitted to enjoy… and it was in many a winter walk by the shores of Ullswater, that he acquired a more complete mastery of a spirit tamed by adversity than his former experience had given him; and that he felt himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh, that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced.” (415) Waverly’s Journey { } Past Future “Romance”“Realism”

8. Progressive Stories of Progress • Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding • (1957) tells the story of just that: the “rise” of “the novel.” • Who is the main character of this story? What happens to “him”? Joyce? “Now” Defoe “Then”

9. “Cli-Fi”