Novelists and Sociologists

Catalog description

One group of 19th-century realist novels, also some later novels with apparently comparable ambitions, are sometimes imagined to have been, in part, responses to things that seemed unprecedented; for example, an acceleration of historical velocity, the diffusion of new forms of economic life, the rise of new classes and pressures on older elites, increasing urbanization, and the apparently sudden and disorienting arrival of something denoted by a word that dated from the beginning of the 19th century: modernity. The ambitions of these novels included description and assessment, in the title of one of them, of “the way we live now.” In roughly the same period, a new social science—sociology—appeared, comparably ambitious and also attempting the description and analysis of new forms of social order and social change. Since some of the novelists and sociologists appear to have been engaged in a comparable project, it may be rewarding to read them together—which is what we will accomplish in this course. Our syllabus may include Balzac’s Père Goriot, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Dickens’ Bleak House, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Ellison’s Invisible Man, Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto, and Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Whether it proves particularly profitable to read these writers in the same course is to be determined. Nevertheless, we will certainly read some good books. Walt Whitman and Luso-Hispanic Poetry LITR 3246 Neil Arditi Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring | 5 credits Whitman famously embraced the internal contradictions in his poetry, asserting, “I contain multitudes.” His statement was also prophetic—and not only with regard to his large and diverse progeny among poets writing in English. Whitman’s impact on Hispanic and Portuguese literary culture began with José Martí’s 1887 essay, “El poeta Walt Whitman,” written by the exiled Cuban poet…