Surveillance and the Realist Novel

Catalog description

Over the past few decades, surveillance has become an inescapable presence in our day-to-day lives. From our phones listening to us, to facial recognition through in-store surveillance monitoring, to the geographical data we surrender every time we upload a run to Strava nothing is private. Much like the relationship between rising surveillance and the rapid technological advancement of today, the nineteenth-century saw an increase in surveillance and the apparatuses available to exercise it, shaping surveillance into a central preoccupation of the nineteenth century's most rapidly-evolving literary form: the realist novel. This course examines how discourses of surveillance shape the novel form in the nineteenth century and today- from a period heavily associated with both the rise of the novel and the rise of regulatory infrastructures to our own contemporary context. We will explore surveillance as the subject of novelistic representation in its depictions of capitalism and social class, law, policing, and sexuality, while also considering how novels (and more broadly, form itself) react to and against the surveillance of reading. Our primary text selection will begin by focusing on nineteenth-century novels (Balzac's Pere Goriot and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations), where we'll locate how surveillance operated in the epoch's newly industrialized cities and influenced the modes of narration, character development, and plot structures associated with literary realism. We will then consider how the confluence of new surveillance culture and globalization impact the contemporary realist novel in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Secondary readings from key works in critical theory, postcolonial criticism, and queer theory, as well as theories of the novel, will give us a robust conceptual framework to supplement our primary texts.