BASC70092 - Middlemarch
Course Description
New Section Added! Section 21W2 will meet on Thursday evenings, 6-9:15 pm with instructor Noah Chafets.
There is no finer novel in English than George Eliot's Middlemarch. In prose that is as elegant and incisive as Shakespeare's verse, it tells the story of a fictional town in the English Midlands from 1829 to 1832. Although its roughly two dozen characters are given unequal weight in the narrative, Eliot captures each one with an exquisite psychological sensitivity. The novel's criss-crossing plots follow characters through romance, marriage, loss, intrigue, sudden changes of fortune and status, and the steady cultivation of a broad variety of ambitions – personal, religious, social, intellectual and political. Eliot combines a theorist's gift for expressing general truths in plain and arresting language with a bracingly intimate understanding of the manner in which the stories a person tells herself – about herself, the people around her, what the world holds for her and how to live well in it – make her who she is. Our reading may take us in any number of directions. But we will be especially attentive to the novel's structure and narrative style, its characters' readings of themselves, its balancing of the psychological and the material, and its insights into fantasy, social pressure, gender, class and historical change.
Notes
Deadline for Online Registration: Wednesday, December 30. Online Registration for Winter Quarter courses will close on Wednesday, December 30 at 5pm CT. Register today to secure your place!
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