Spring 2005 Class - Scandinavian Prose
Here's an excerpt from the syllabus from my Spring Prose Seminar:
Course Goals and Proposed Questions:
Topics in Scandinavian Prose 2005 focuses on a selection of narratives representing various prose genres: novels, novellas, tales and stories. The selected texts exemplify some of the conventions and tendencies of Romanticism, Neo-Romanticism/Symbolism, and Modernism, closely affiliated literary movements. The selected texts will likely prove useful in exploring some of the following questions:
- Romantic or Modernist? What is the relevance or usefulness of these terms for the study of literary texts? How are these terms defined or re-defined by recent scholarship and critical literature? How are these terms distinctly applicable to Scandinavian literary history? How are definitions of "Romantic" or "Modern" literature represented or challenged by the selected texts?
- Meta-textual or metafictive? Metafiction is generally regarded as a 'Modern' literary phenomenon, as fiction that deals playfully and self-referentially with the creative process, with the conventions of fiction, with the author, and with language itself. Do/how do these texts operate on a self-referential level or as meta-texts? Further, what role does the narrator play in a metafictive text?
- Religious Representations? Romantic and modernist texts often range in the spiritual, religious, or “metaphysical” realm. Certainly, the Romantics, Symbolists, Neo-Romantics and Modernists tended to cultivate the religious, the spiritual, and the metaphysical dimensions of human experience. There are many ways in which these texts lend themselves to analysis of the representation of specific religious beliefs, dogmas, and institutions. What is the relationship between the text and specific mythologies or religions [for example, Catholicism, Protestantism, Pantheism, etc.]? How does the text, the narrator, or the author construct, challenge, encourage or undermine a religious sensibility? (Questions of gender construction would work well here too).
- Genre questions: As this is a course in prose, students might also consider the distinguishing characteristics of various prose genres. What distinguishes the novella from the novel (roman)? The fairy tale or tale (eventyr) from the story (historie)? What are the generic conventions at play in these texts? How are first-person narratives or "diaries" used as a novelistic device? What are the various subgenres of the novel represented by this selection?
