Ben Paul

Minor Field Reading List (Final) — Theory of the Novel

• GENRE THEORY
1) Aristotle — Poetics (c. 335 BC)
2) Jose Ortega y Gasset — “A Short Treatise on the Novel” (1914)
3) Georg Lukács — Theory of the Novel (1916)
4) Mikhail Bakhtin — The Dialogic Imagination (1934-1941) (“Epic and the Novel”; “Chronotope in the
Novel”; “Discourse in the Novel”)
5) Walter Benjamin — “The Storyteller” (1936)
6) Northrop Frye — Anatomy of Criticism (1957) (“Fourth Essay—Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres”)

• REALISM
7) Virginia Woolf — “Modern Fiction” (1921); “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924)
8) Erich Auerbach — Mimesis (1946) (“Odysseus’ Scar”; “In the Hotêl de la Mole”; “The Brown Stocking”)
9) Ian Watt — The Rise of the Novel (1957) (“Realism and the Novel Form”)
10) Roland Barthes — “The Reality Effect” (1968)
11) Fredric Jameson — Antinomies of Realism (2013) (Intro; Chapters 1, 2, 7, 8)
12) Jacques Rancière — “The Thread of the Novel” (2014)
13) Elaine Freedgood — Worlds Enough (2019) (Introduction, “Denotation”)

• FORMALISM, STRUCTURALISM
14) Henry James — “The Art of Fiction” (1884); “Preface to The Portrait of a Lady” (1909)
15) Viktor Shklovsky — Theory of Prose (1925) (“Art as Device”; “The Novel as Parody”)
16) V.N. Volosinov — “Discourse in Life and Discourse in Art” (1925)
17) Joseph Frank — “Spatial Form in Modern Literature” (1945)
18) Roland Barthes — S/Z (1970)
19) Tzvetan Todorov — The Poetics of Prose (1971) (selections as anthologized in Hale)
20) Dorrit Cohn — Transparent Minds (1978) (selections as anthologized in McKeon)
21) Ann Banfield — Unspeakable Sentences (1982) (selections as anthologized in McKeon)
22) Gérard Genette — “Introduction to the Paratext” (1987)
23) Frances Ferguson — “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form” (2000)
24) Alex Woloch —The One vs. The Many (2003) (selections as anthologized in Moretti)

• POLITICAL & HISTORICAL APPROACHES

25) Georg Lukács — “Narrate or Describe?” (1936)
26) Fredric Jameson — The Political Unconscious (1981) (Chapters 1, 2, and 5)
27) D. A. Miller — The Novel and the Police (1988) (Chapters 1 and 6)
28) Roger Chartier — “Laborers and Voyagers” (1992)
29) Franco Moretti — “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000)
30) Jonathan Arac — “Anglo-Globalism?” (2002)
31) Nancy Armstrong — How Novels Think (2005)
32) Dorothy Hale —The Novel and the New Ethics (2020)

• AESTHETICS
33) Immanuel Kant — The Critique of Judgment (1790) (“Analytic of the Beautiful”)
34) G.W.F. Hegel — Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (c. 1820)
35) Martin Heidegger — “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1950)
36) Theodor Adorno — “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (1958); “Commitment” (1962); Draft Introduction to
Aesthetic Theory (1970)
37) Jacques Rancière — Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000)

• REFERENCE NOVELS
38) Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary (1856)
39) Virginia Woolf — To the Lighthouse (1927)
Anthologies Cited:
Dorothy J. Hale, The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900-2000
Michael McKeon, Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach
Franco Moretti, The Novel, Vol. 2: Forms and Themes