Reminders Reading really picks up this week and next. What does it mean to “come prepared” for a discussion on a long text? – Read and annotate – Be ready to refer to specific passages that you have marked. Go back to these, if you read ahead, and remind yourself of why they are interesting. Final is still down the road… – Note-taking

The Novel Form Ian Watt and “The Rise of the Novel”

Why are we reading this? There are many possible reasons why it is difficult to talk about the “form” of the novel: The novel as natural/familiar – The novel is the form which most resembles “natural” ways of speaking. – It has no distinctive formal conventions or structures, it is just the way stories are told. – But is it truly “common-sense” or are we just too used to it…? The novel as “realistic” – Conversations about novels are often staged in terms of its “realistic” portrayals – whether or not it adequately “reflects” its historical conditions, for instance. – This reading practice tends to neglect language.

Watt’s perspective Watt’s account in “Realism and the Novel Form” challenges both of these assumptions, arguing that: The novel does have formal conventions – The novel represents a significant departure from pre-modern forms – The reason they seem so “natural” is because these conventions emerge from shared ideas about society and the experience of being human that have become dominant in the “modern” era. “Realism” is a complex term – “The real” is a historically changing category produced by dominant ideas about perception and the nature of the world – “Realism” is an effect produced by the formal conventions of the novel – “Formal realism” (Watt 32). – “…an issue which the novel raises more sharply than any other literary form – the problem of the correspondence between the literary work and the reality which it imitates” (Watt 11).

“The Rise of the Novel” We can examine these conventions if we look at them at the point of their emergence – the 18 th C in Britain. “Rise of the Novel” scholarship studies the novel’s emergence in the early days of modernity, alongside: – Liberalist philosophy and political theory – The modern nation-state and its institutions – The democratic “public sphere” – Capitalism and the Printing Press

“The Rise of the Novel” The intellectual and socio-historical currents of the enlightenment can be said to have given us science, democracy (and changed the way we think about nations, capitalism, race) What kind of CULTURAL FORMS did it produce? Answer: the novel. – To understand Watt’s point here, it might be useful to look back at our earlier course texts

“The Rise of the Novel” – The Ode and the 5-Act Drama that Shakespeare employs are both forms that descend from the classical period. – The Sonnet predates the Renaissance. “Previous literary forms had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth… the merits of the author’s treatment were judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted models in the genre” (13). – Shakespeare’s plots were often taken from other sources because originality in plot and character were not more “true” than conventions of archetype and abstract universals. – Poetic forms strike modern individuals as artificial and stiflingly conventional, but can you imagine living in a social world where these forms were perceived as “natural” or the height of “realism”? “This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience – individual experience which is always unique and therefore new.”

What are the formal conventions of the novel? Conventions: What are the formal characteristics of the novel’s realism according to Watt? (pg #s) (if you can, think about where you can locate these conventions in Jane Eyre) Origins/Effects: What philosophies, values, or principles are these conventions based on? What effects do they generally produce?

Staging “Experience” in the Novel Chapters 1-4 Who is the narrator of Jane Eyre? From what perspective is the narrative voice speaking to us? – When? Where exactly? – Why? What defines this presentation of experience and narration as “realistic”? What kinds of problems does it present with

Staging “Experience” in the Novel