English - Free topic C: What Novels Know

This course will explore the different ways in which fiction can feel true.  We’ll be reading a collection of equally gripping but very different British and American fiction.  In doing so, we’ll be asking:  does trueness involves fidelity to real events?  Are time and space in novels like those in real life?  Is a novel written in the third person less true than a first person fiction?  This course will be organized into two parts, one focusing on first person fiction that draws on personal experience for its feeling of truth.  Here we will read novels by recent authors including Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Lisa Halliday, and Sally Rooney.  The second part will focus on fictions that describe things less accessible – historical or hypothetical worlds. In this section, we’ll read fiction by writers like Hilary Mantel, Susannah Clarke, and Octavia Butler, that try to access what cannot be accessed: past experiences that were never recorded, possible futures, and fantastical realms that might live inside the human mind itself. Secondary readings will include classic works on mimesis (ie, Auerbach, Lucaks) and more recent theories of the novel (ie, Bewes, Currie, Felski, Wiegman).