SPAN 6470 - Theory of the Novel: Modernity’s Subjects

Spring. 4 credits.

Conducted in Spanish. This is the mandatory graduate seminar for 1st-year Spanish graduate students.

S. Pinet.

Emerging in the wake of psychoanalysis, the theory of the novel is an effect of a new discourse on the subject within a modernity that sees itself as different and searches for a historical parallel. Focused on four late medieval Iberian genres that explore different possibilities for prose fiction, this course will alternate the reading of primary texts (Amadis de Gaula, Cárcel de amor, La Diana, Lazarillo de Tormes) with selected readings from canonical theorists of the novel, especially those of relevance to Hispanic literary criticism, which may include Lukács, Guillén, Ortega y Gasset, Bakhtin, Jameson, Frye, Culler, Cascardi, Benjamin, Freud, Lévi-Strauss, assessing the possible consequences of this course’s main hypothesis: that of the novel is simultaneously a theory of modernity and a theory of the subject.