Course Description
This course proposes to examine the genre of the novel in the face of the phenomenon of globalization and its implications for the representation of the city and urban life. We will slowly read four novels that deal with the tensions among globalization, the literary making of a genre, and the urban condition. We will begin the course with Venice—which economist Giovanni Arrighi understood to be the first center of a world-system. Calvino’s Invisible Cities is a beautiful meditation on imaginings of Venice that also debates both the limitations of Marco Polo and his traveler’s gaze and tests the limits of the novel genre as it shades into poetry. After that, we will turn to more general theoretical considerations of “world literature” and the idea of a “global novel.” Our focus will be on both the development of the literary genre and on the way that the genre has been formed, in often clandestine ways, by the interconnectedness of a globalized world—with, arguably, both salutary and destructive effects for culture and for individual lives. In the 19th century, we will consider Melville’s Moby-Dick—a wild outlier in terms of form that is (nevertheless or therefore) central to the American novel. For the 20th and 21st centuries, we will turn away from more expected texts (for there is no end of great writing about globalization in this period) to texts about the city (Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway) and about our ethical entanglement in a globalized world and its environment (Millet’s How the Dead Dream), where such questions are decisive, if perhaps more hidden, and where the heritage of the early novel’s formation through globalization is as if encrypted in self-conscious or self-reflexive form. At the end of the semester, we will return to Venice once again for our concluding considerations of the questions raised by the course.

Learning Outcomes
The course will:
1. Introduce students to some general questions of globalization in a literary context;
2. Offer an introduction to the novel as a genre; and
3. Suggest ways to think about the close reading of literary texts.

Course evaluation
Co-curricular activity: 5%
Class presentation and participation: 15%
Midterm paper: 30%
Final Paper: 50%

Requirements
1. Attendance and thoughtful participation in class discussion

2. Oral presentations: each student will give two SHORT (no more than 5-minute) introductions to a text that we are discussing. (There will be a signup sheet online.) In these presentations, you should point us to one passage that you would like to discuss. You do not need to have a fully developed reading; your primary job will be to point us to a passage that interests or perplexes you and then to raise a series of questions that you think it will be useful for us to discuss.

3. Co-curricular activity:
--In a group of two or three, visit a site in Venice you have learned about in one of the readings (or a site that contains a work of art that interests you), and then (each of you) write a brief report (of one page or less) on what you saw and learned. Visiting the site should take about four hours, and at least one person in your group should be from a school other than your home institution. Many sites in and near Venice can be visited for free (or for little money).

4. Midterm paper:

Option One:
--Choose one short passage from one of the texts in the course, and type it
out at the top of the page.
--Write one to two pages about the passage, highlighting intriguing or perplexing details. (These details might include: the vocabulary or syntax; the cadence or sound; tensions or excesses in the figurative language; effects of tone; difficulties or otherwise intriguing aspects of voice or perspective; the relation to what comes before or after the passage; and so on. I will provide a longer guide to possible questions for literary reading.)

Option Two:
--Choose one of the theoretical readings for the course, and write a one-to-two-page summary of it. You should give a careful and accurate account of its argument, while also highlighting potential tensions or difficulties that you see in it.

5. Final paper:
Again, two options:
Option One:
Begin with your midterm paper or else choose a different text, choosing a passage that particularly interests you, and that you think raises conceptual questions that can be expanded into a 5-10 page paper. The conceptual question might develop from our theoretical readings, or it might be a question about the consequences of a particular effect you have noticed in your text having to do, for example, with the narrative voice, tone, modes of characterization, perspective, figurative language, modes of address, and so on. You don’t need to spell this out at the beginning of the paper; by the end of the paper, though, it should be clear to you (and your reader) what your question was. You might want to talk to me about the question and perhaps your selection of passages.
--revise (expand, cut, rewrite) your original reading of your passage (do this now, or after you have done the steps below).
--return to 3 to 5 other passages in your text that allow you to formulate and then add nuance or complication to the question that has been raised for you by your initial passage. Write similar readings (of about one page or more) of each of these passages, and then decide on the order in which these readings should be presented. (You might think about ordering them from simplest to most complex; in any event, you should think about what order makes sense. (You can also decide on the order before you compose the readings, of course.)
--write the connective material linking your readings together into a single argument. This connective material will also lead you to reconsider the readings you have made. So revise those with your new sense of the connections in mind. (This is the stage at which the “general” question should become more and more clear to you. It is fine for you to start with your passages and to get to the general question by linking them together.)

Option Two:
--Choose three to four significant passages from the theoretical material in the course, and type them out as discrete quotations that you will address in your paper.
--For each one, write a brief account that gives a quick summary of the larger argument of the essay from which it is drawn (you can incorporate your midterm summary here, if relevant), and highlighting what you think are the important conceptual questions raised.
--As in option one, then, write the connective material linking your readings together into a single argument. This connective material will also lead you to reconsider the readings you have made. So revise those with your new sense of the connections in mind. (This is the stage at which the “general” question should become more and more clear to you. It is fine for you to start with your passages and to get to the general question by linking them together.)

For both options, once you have completed the preliminary steps:
--revise the entire paper, seeing it now as a whole rather than a series of discrete parts. Each time through, consider what you may have missed in the readings of your passages. Are there details that you glossed over or misconstrued? Is the order right, or do you need to reshuffle things?
--revise the paper at least once looking only at your sentences: are they as clear and elegant as they can be? If you read the paper out loud, is there any sentence that sounds terrible (awkward, confusing, not what you meant)? Does each sentence say what you meant, in the clearest possible language?
--you might note (for yourself) that this is all a different procedure than starting with a generalization and then seeking for evidence. (Do not think of the passages as “evidence” for a “thesis.”) Here, you begin by noticing something small; the generalization or argument is produced by linking that observation to a series of other, similar observations.
--if you want to look at secondary material, that is fine (but is not required for the final paper in the course). If you decide you would like to consider secondary material, begin your search with the MLA Bibliography. On the Boston College site you can find it here: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?authtype=ip,shib&custid=s4194587&profile=ehost&defaultdb=mzh. For students at other institutions, check your university library webpage. You will find scholarly articles and books here; it should be much more reliable than google. You can also begin with a search on your library’s webpage, but the MLA bibliography is more targeted to literary scholarship. You might also remember that publication does not, unfortunately, ensure quality; you will need to decide for yourself what you think of each argument.
--the final paper should be between 5 and 10 pages (a little more is fine, too). Papers should be typed, double-spaced, and carefully proofread. Email them to me (at Ohi@bc.edu), on or before the deadline.
--You can talk to me about your paper at any point during the semester.

Syllabus

(The readings are listed for the day of our discussions; read the indicated texts before the class for which they are listed.)

I. Globalization beginning with Venice:

Week One:
Day One: Introductions

Day Two: Giovanni Arrighi, “Hegemony, Capitalism, and Territorialism,” from The Long Twentieth Century, pp. 27-47. Borrow on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/longtwentiethcen00arri/page/27/mode/1up

Week Two:
Day One: Mary McCarthy, “Venice Preserved” and “The Loot” from Venice Observed

Day Two: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [For Italian, see Le città invisibili (Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1972)]

Week Three:
Calvino, Invisible Cities (continued)

II. Theoretical Questions:

Week Four:
Day One: David Damrosch, “Toward a History of World Literature”
Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”

Day Two: Fredric Jameson, “New Literary History after the End of the New”
Frances Ferguson, “Planetary Literary Criticism”

Week Five:
Day One: John Limon, “Escapism, or the Soul of Globalization”
(Optional: The Sound of Music [film])

III. Globalization and Literary Texts:

Day Two: Eça de Queiroz, “The Mandarin” [For Portuguese, see O Mandarim]

Week 6:
Day One: Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick: “Etymology,” “Extracts,” and Chapters One and Two

Day Two: Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapters 3-30

Week 7:
Day One: Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapters 31-58

Day Two: Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapters 59-85

Week 8:
Day One: Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapters 86-112

Day Two: Melville, Moby-Dick, Chapters 113-end

Week 9:
Day One: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (first third)

Day Two: Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (second third)

Week 10:
Day One: Mrs. Dalloway (to end)

Day Two: Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream (first third)

Week 11:
Day One: Millet, How the Dead Dream, continued (second third)

Day Two: Millet, How the Dead Dream, continued (to end)

IV. Ending with a return to Venice

Week 12:
Day One: Giorgio Agamben, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of Living Among Spectres” [For text in Italian, see Nudità (Nottetempo, 2009).]

Day Two: Visconti, Death in Venice (film)

Texts:
Hermann Melville, Moby-Dick
ISBN: 9780679783275
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
ISBN: 9780156628709
Lydia Millet, How the Dead Dream
ISBN: 9780156035460
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
ISBN: 9780156453806

Short essays and stories listed in the schedule

Last update: January 22, 2024