COML 2033 - Crimes and Passions in The European Novel

(HB) (LA-AS)

Fall. 4 credits.

N. Saccamano.

This course will introduce students to some of the most acclaimed works of European fiction by considering why these novels tend to focus on morally, socially, and legally transgressive acts and passions. Topics will include: desire and forms of identity; plots of seduction and adultery; the role of gender in defining the genre and, in particular, the concept of “character”; the intersection between novelistic form and European social and intellectual history; realism, romance, and the novel’s political unconscious; the representation of individual experience through first- and third-person narration. Authors may include: Laclos, Goethe, Brontë, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevksy, Kafka, Woolf, and Proust.