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The novel, argued Mikhail Bakhtin, is "the only developing genre," the only one "as yet uncompleted." Georg Lukács similarly characterized the novel as "something in process of becoming." If both Bakhtin and Lukács provocatively imagined the novel as an open future, they less productively fixed its "real" birth in the eighteenth century and its birthplace in Europe. Embedded not just in novels, then, but in the very idea of the novel is a potent ideology of history, often Eurocentric. Gamal al-Ghitani, for one, would issue the novel a different birth certificate. The Egyptian novelist maintains (rather controversially) that the Arabic novel is in fact 1,600 years old--as old as the recorded history of Arabic literature. Indeed, the novel might be less "novel" than we think, old as the history of *human* literature: it turns up in ancient Greece (as even Bakhtin is compelled to acknowledge), in eleventh-century Japan, in early-fourteenth-century Ethiopia, and in eighteenth-century China. This course will explore the novel both as genre and as idea: as a story of origins--a type of fiction that tells us how a person, place, or time comes into being and becomes--and an origin story of modernity and progress (not just literary but also social, economic, and technological). Taking a broadly comparative worldview of the genre, we will try to imagine a more novel history and definition of the novel. What makes a novel a "novel"? Why are so many cultures so eager to claim it? In what language do and "must" novels speak? What kinds of subjectivity do and "must" novels represent, and how? How does the novel relate the fictional to the real and to the historical? How is the rise of the modern novel linked to the rise of corporate capitalism, modern imperial and colonial formations, the nation-state, mass production, and mass literacy and reading publics--and must it always be predicated on these social facts? Is the novel as "democratic" a genre, linguistically and politically, as it is sometimes held to be? What is the novel's relationship to other genres (epic, lyric, other forms) and to other media (newspaper, photography, film, television, new media)? Was Bakhtin right to say that the novel is a composite of all other literary genres--and kills off whatever it swallows? Are other genres really dead at the hands of the novel? Is the novel itself getting old? Will it ever die? Readings will include novels by Ali, Balzac, Brontë, Cao, Cha, and Salih; snapshots of the novel in its pre-eighteenth-century global sweep; and critical, historical, and theoretical texts by Bakhtin, Benjamin, Fitzpatrick, Freedgood, Gallagher, Gu, Inoue, Johnson, Joshi, Kilito, Lukács, Moretti, and Mukherjee, among others. By the end of this seminar, we will come away with a sharper sense of the novel's complex origins, relations to modernity, and futures--and a keen awareness (and wariness?) of its pleasures.

Other Workload: Graduate students will write one formal 18- to 20-page seminar paper; undergraduates will write two formal 8- to 10-page papers. For each paper, a two-page prospectus (proposal) will be due in advance of the paper deadline; the graduate student prospectus will be worth 10% of the final course grade, and the two undergraduate paper prospectuses each will be worth 5% of the final course grade. Students will give one oral presentation (10 minutes each plus Q&A), solo or in pairs. For all students, the class participation grade will include--among other requirements--three 300-word informal Canvas discussion posts on course readings, plus two 300-word replies to other students' posts.