BASC70168 - The Art and Ends of Reading: The Novel I—Don Quixote

Course Description

Why read Don Quixote? It remains the best as well as the first of all novels, just as Shakespeare remains the best of all dramatists. There are parts of yourself you will not know fully until you know, as well as you can, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. (Bloom, How to Read and Why, p. 150) “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,” proclaims Georg Lukacs. We consider the relation of novelistic form to the modern soul—at a loss in world abandoned by God—through a reading of Lukacs’s magisterial work, The Theory of the Novel (selections) and E.M. Forster’s classic, Aspects of the Novel, in conjunction with Cervantes, Don Quixote, “the best as well as the first of all novels” according to Harold Bloom, and selected commentaries by Miguel de Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Bloom, and others.

Course Outline

Course Syllabus

Required Texts:

Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, tr. Edith Grossman (paperback: 978-006093434; hardcover: 978-0060188702)

Forster, E.M., Aspects of the Novel [Harvest/HBJ] 978-0156091800

Lukacs, Georg, The Theory of the Novel [MIT] 978-0262620277

Ortega y Gasset, José, Meditations on Quixote [Norton] 978-0393001259

Notes

Online registration deadline: Thursday, Sept 22 at 5 PM CT.

No class Nov 26