English 337
The Modern Novel

Course Introduction

Scope of the Course

The University of Washington General Catalog describes English 337 as: "The novel on both sides of the Atlantic in the first half of the twentieth century. Includes such writers as Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Stein, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others." Such a description might surprise you, for modern is also used to mean "recently" or "just now." In literary circles, however, modern is a chronological or period designation that refers, as the catalog states, to the years 1900–1950. Yet, modern doesn't refer to all the authors who wrote during those years, but only to those who broke new ground in fiction. The Modern Novel, in other words, includes fiction that appeared in the first half of this century that deviated in significant ways from what had been written by such authors as Jane Austen, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot.

Let me say a few more words here about the deviation. Consider the following statements:

1. "But we shall smash the frame. Then, and then only, shall we be able to begin living" (D. H. Lawrence, 1915).
2. "On or about December 1910 human nature changed" (Virginia Woolf, 1924).
3. "The revolt against Victorianism meant to the young poet a revolt against the poetic diction of everybody" (William Butter Yeats, 1939).

As I read over these quotations from three key British modernists, the first thing that grabs my attention is the words "smash," "changed," and "revolt." Modern writers deliberately and self-consciously set themselves in opposition to what came before, and their opposition to the world of the nineteenth century was intense. They wanted to smash the frame of the world in order to truly live; they believed that human beings were different creatures from what they had been; and they wanted to alter the appearance of literature. In this version of English 337, we will be reading fiction that knowingly tries to be new, both in the worlds it portrays and the techniques it employs (though I should add that at this late date some of the newness has worn off: it was new for its time). Given its refusal to conserve what was, and its commitment to radical newness, the modern novel has often upset and confused readers. But it has also delivered new visions and experiences. Our task in this course will be to encounter the new, to sort out its claims, and to decide whether we like these claims and the packages in which they come.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. I will reply on the same forum.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Required Texts

• Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (Scribner, 1996) ISBN: 0684822768
• Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Avon, 1982) ISBN: 0380002450
• D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (Penguin, 1985) ISBN: 0451518829
• Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest Books, 1990) ISBN: 0156628708
• William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (Random House, 1964) ISBN: 067973225X
• Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Random House, 1995) ISBN: 0679732764
• James Joyce, Dubliners; read only "The Dead" (Penguin, 2000) ISBN: 0141182458

A note about these texts—the editions I have listed above are the ones the Distance Learning program has the University Book Store order for this course. If you wish to use other editions, either because you own them or you want to borrow them from the library, feel free to do so. I ask only that if you use an edition other than the one ordered for the course, you note which one it is at the end of your assignment. Also, there is a small chance that one of the books required for this course will go out of print; these days publishers care less and less about what they publish, and more and more about quick profits. If this happens, you will have to rely on second-hand bookstores or libraries.

Organization of the Course

I have divided the reading into five lessons, and each lesson has a different focus. Taken as a whole, the lessons explore what we mean by "the modern novel," and make contact with the various ways that protean creature has of being new and different.

Lesson One: The Modern and the Modern Novel

This lesson begins with an introduction to some of the literary issues pertaining to the first half of the twentieth century. I will discuss what is meant by a novel's being "modern," and after doing that quite extensively, I will discuss Hemingway's In Our Time in order for you to see modernity in action.

Lesson Two: Modern Gender Relations

In this lesson we will read two novels that might loosely be called coming-of-age fiction. Kate Chopin's The Awakening is about a married mother living at the end of the nineteenth century in the American South, and about her gradual realization that, as a result of her gender, she occupies a marginal, second-class position in the world. Chopin's novel is about a woman's efforts to cast off the old assumptions and stereotypes, and the difficulties of doing so in a gender-polarized world. Written as it was in 1900, The Awakening is chronologically poised between the old and the new, and its content is equally poised between rejecting the old and soberly assessing the possibilities for something new.

D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers concerns a young man's efforts to free himself from the dominant hand, first, of his mother, and second, of his first lover, and then to see whether it is possible to live well and autonomously. Though the differences between Lawrence's novel and Chopin's are obvious, both represent efforts by modern fiction to "smash" conventional ideas about gender relations and to explore the possibilities inherent in rethinking those relations. Neither novel is technically radical, but both challenge nineteenth century orthodoxy about men and women.

Lesson Three: The Modern Experimental Novel

The two novels discussed in this lesson, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, struck their contemporaries as experimental in form and technique, and they will probably make a similar impact on you. My purpose in assigning them, therefore, is to explore their innovative techniques. This is not to say that what is said in either novel is all that conventional, but only to note what my focus in this lesson will be. Though you may struggle at first while reading the two novels, I think you will agree when you finish studying them that experiment can provide us with pleasure while putting us in touch with portions of reality unavailable to conventional fiction.

Lesson Four: A Modern Masterpiece

Here I ask you to read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. While Ellison is almost everyone's estimation of America's preeminent African-American novelist, I do not assign him because of his race. Invisible Man is a masterpiece of modern fiction, and we will read it to see how a first-rate novelist adapts the themes and techniques of the modern novel to his own enterprise in fiction.

Lesson Five: Preparation for the Final Examination

This lesson helps you prepare to take the final examination for this course. While the first four lessons involve papers, each of which is assigned at the appropriate place in the online course materials, the final exam entails writing under controlled circumstances. I will explain this further in Lesson Five. Meanwhile, let me simply note here that to prepare for the final exam you will read and carefully study the final story in Joyce's Dubliners. "The Dead" is a great piece of fiction, and will be a fitting text with which to end English 337.

Course Objectives

Let me conclude my discussion of the course organization by listing for you the goals I have. They are implicit in what I have written above about each lesson, but it is also useful to outline them here. The objectives of this course are for you to

• be able to define what is meant by "the modern novel";
• analyze how two modern novels took exception to traditional ideas about gender relations;
• describe how experiment works in fiction and to appreciate the pleasure and instruction it can provide us;
• encounter one indisputable masterpiece of modern fiction and to describe some of the sources of its success; and
• test your competency acquired through the course by being responsible for a text of modern fiction without aid from the online course materials.

Negotiating the Course

This section contains the nuts and bolts of the online course materials. There is much more substance with respect to literature in the lessons, but here I outline my assumptions, expectations, and advice for the course. This is the place where you learn about me and the pedagogical ideas I have. If you make use of what I say here, I think you will find the course more accessible and interesting, and your final grade quite to your liking.

Using the Online Course Materials

I encourage you to do the reading for a lesson before you read my commentary on the course site. This does not mean that what I have to say about the fiction is worth skipping, but I think it is important that you form your opinions of the reading before you encounter mine. George Bernard Shaw once said that all professions are conspiracies against the laity; applied to the teaching of literature that means that those of us who profess it tend to keep students from learning to read it on their own. I am interested in the development of your ability to read; but if you read my words before you read the novels, you will tend to see the novels through my eyes. Your reading experience will then be undercut by mine. The more you work out your ideas independently, the better your papers for the course will be, because it will be your authority, not mine, that informs them. We work better when we start from our own center rather than one we borrowed.

Sometime during the course of your reading you will be tempted to seek commentaries in the library; I discourage you from doing so. Believe me, there is plenty there on everything we are reading. But having been a student once, and for too long perhaps, I know very well the motive for going off to the library: to be sure we are on solid ground and to approach paper-writing without anxiety. The trouble is that what you find in the library is written by professionals, for professionals. As I learned the hard way years ago, when a nonprofessional tries to use secondary material, the results are often comical. You'll do better in this course if you trust yourself, your intelligence, and your ideas.

Finally, once you have read the fiction assigned for a lesson, read the lesson closely, and as you do so, try to remember the following: First, it is the product of many years of teaching and writing about literature. It is written with a confidence, insight, and clarity (and perhaps arrogance?) that the author did not have when in your shoes, so do not judge your efforts against it. Second, despite the fact that the author is a "professional" student of literature, he is still one human being among many, limited by his perspectives, prejudices, and commitments. The online course materials try to be as fair and complete as possible, but they are not the Truth. They are not infallible. The greatest compliment you can pay is to read the lessons carefully and then, if such is the case, to disagree. To fake your response out of fear of my intolerance will diminish your work in my eyes, for I am most intolerant of fakery (and I am good at sniffing it out). Education, someone once argued, is the insistence of a teacher and the resistance of a student. These lessons insist on their insights into the literature; resist them if you find them unconvincing.

Writing Assignments

There are four papers and one final examination in this course. Topics and directions appear on the assignment pages, but first I would like you to consider the following general points about writing.

The best advice I can give you to help you write well you will find the hardest to follow—after you read the assigned material for a lesson, after you read my discussion of it, and after you compare what you think with what I wrote, reread the book. I know this sounds tiresome. But I speak from my experience and my conviction that the main reason student writing does not rise to the levels it aspires to is that most students don't know what they are talking about. (A Cook's Tour through a novel is about as revealing as spending two hours on a bus touring London.) You are much more intelligent than you think, and a much better writer than the national press would have us think. But your abilities cannot manifest themselves if you have only a fuzzy command of what you read. So, please, do try rereading. Remember, my job is to help you realize your potential, and I argue for rereading not out of sadism but because I know it produces better writing.

Once you are ready to write, that is, when you are fully informed, you will still have anxieties about what I want from you unless you are exceptional. I will suggest my sense of what makes for good writing, and I hope that eases your burden.

First of all, good spelling, grammar, and syntax are not the sole ingredients of good writing. They are simply conventions we follow if we wish to be members in good standing of the writing public. If we violate these conventions, we invite others to think as ill of us as they would if we behaved rudely in other areas of our lives. Avoid writing rudely; however, doing so will not automatically make your writing successful.

To be successful, you have to write in a voice that is not generic (those used, for example, by telephone solicitors), or formulaic (a formulaic voice is one that announces, for example, "In this essay I will . . ." at the beginning of a paper), or borrowed from someone else (don't try to sound like me, for instance). A human voice is the one we use when we write to our best friend or talk to her on the phone; it is a voice that includes the pronoun "I" when it is appropriate; it is a voice that is sad when we are sad, angry when we are angry, excited when we are excited. If you own your voice in your writing, you are on your way to success.

Good writing also requires that you care about what you write. If you are cynical about taking English 337, you will approach your writing without interest—except an interest in getting credit. If this is your motive, let me ask you this—if you are not interested in what you write, how can you expect me to be? Do you want me to be cynical about your writing, to read it only in order to get paid? I doubt it; so we will both be happier if you find your interest and write out of it.

There is one problem, however, with this conclusion: I will be providing topics for your writing and you may find yourself unable to connect with them. If that proves to be the case, you are welcome to construct your own topics. (Should you elect this option, please write a brief explanation of how and why you arrived at your topic; the explanation can come after you are finished with the paper.) On the other hand, if you can connect to my topics, there might still be a problem. If your experience has been like mine, your English classes in the past taught you to set aside your own opinions for what were thought to be the right ones (usually the teacher's). This meant that you became good at sniffing out what you were "supposed" to believe, and less good at knowing your own positions. It is hard to reverse that training, and I do still have the power of the grade. I can only assure you that I give good grades for good writing, not for writing that contains my opinions. Good writing occurs only when you honor yourself. It is the humanly right thing to do, and in this case doing the right thing will prove to be prudent.

Finally, you will write well if you read well, and while there is no room in the online course materials for an introduction to literary analysis, I do want to help you read better. In Lesson One you will find my discussion of what is modern about the modern novel, and I intend that discussion to help you read better. I also want to remind you of something I and my colleagues take for granted. Reading a novel is not a matter of uncovering the "true meaning" hidden within it. To explain that claim would require me to write a book about epistemology (that branch of philosophy that concerns how we know what we know), and this is not the place for that, you will be relieved to hear. So this will have to suffice—novels speak in their language, and it is then up to us to speak for them in ours. Our success in speaking is not measured by some notion of how close we come to an imaginary idea of the true meaning hidden within novels; our success is instead a matter of writing well—following conventions, speaking in our own voice, honoring what we think, and knowing what we are talking about. In the final analysis, reading well is also a matter of writing well.

Evaluation

The four papers and the final exam in this course each count for one-fifth of the final grade; but because it takes a while for us to get to know each other, I will make allowances for improvement. If you steadily produce better work, your final grade will reflect that fact.

At the same time, I know you will be worried about being evaluated; I worry about it also. I hope I can ease the worry as follows. First, I know my political, religious, and ethical biases, and I keep them out of my grading. If a paper truly upsets me, however, I make an extra effort to give it the benefit of the doubt. In other words, I think you will receive fair treatment from me. Also, I try to explain my evaluations when I return papers to you. If my explanations make sense, I hope you will try to write your next paper with them in mind. If an explanation does not make sense to you, let me know; I am always happy to reconsider an evaluation if you find my explanation of it inadequate. Finally, I hope I can inspire your confidence in me by explaining my views on the evaluation of papers about literature. It is not at all like marking a problem in mathematics; it is much more like deciding who gets into the Seattle Symphony or onto the Seattle Supersonics.

If a mathematics teacher sets a problem, any of us can use an answer sheet to see if students do the problem correctly. But only those with years of inside experience can make informed, defensible decisions about whom to select for a symphony or to keep on a professional basketball team. This does not mean that they can't be "wrong" or are free from biases; it only means that evaluation in those areas is something that comes easily when an individual has been an insider for a long time. Given that I have been grading papers for over a decade, I think I am about as good at doing it as a professional basketball coach is at evaluating players.

Course Calendar

The course is designed to be completed in three months. In order to do that, I suggest you follow the following calendar for submitting your assignments.

• Lesson One: assignment due at end of second week.
• Lesson Two: assignment due at end of fifth week.
• Lesson Three: assignment due at end of eighth week.
• Lesson Four: assignment due at end of eleventh week.
• Lesson Five: prepare for and take final at end of twelfth week.

Asking Questions and Submitting Assignments

Please send questions about this particular course to your instructor at the e-mail address provided on the "About Your Instructor" page on the course syllabus. You can also find instructions on submitting assignments on the instructor page.

All other questions related to your online course should be addressed to dltechsupp@extn.washington.edu.

About Your Course Developer, Malcolm Griffith

I am an emeritus associate professor of English at the University of Washington. I received my Ph.D. from Ohio State in 1968. During my graduate studies and since that time, three main areas of study hold my interest—Twentieth Century Literature, Modern Criticism, and American Literature.

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