Question: how would you evaluate the general usefulness of the paradigms for understanding the novel we have studied in this class?

In other words, which theories prove most useful for reading novels other than the four we have read in this class?

• Ian Watt: Realism and the whole story of "the progress of the novel" (as it relates to print culture, middle class reading, love & sex & marriage as a privileged topic, and psychological realism)
  • Nancy Armstrong's feminist and Foucaultean variant and/or alternative: the domestic subject as prototype of the modern self
• Bakhtin: dialogism, heteroglossia, and the novel of as a weave of the different speech genres of the social world
• Novel, Nation, the Transnation, and Empire: the novel as the genre uniquely fitted to represent the nation, transnational sentiment/ entertainment, and the imperial project (in other words to represent "home" and "world" in their dynamic exchange): Lynn Festa, Edward Said, Franco Moretti, Benedict Anderson
• Approaches through narrative and language: novels are made of language and telling; Dorrit Cohn, David Marshall
• Historical and Cultural Approaches: Deidre Lynch, William Galperin

If a theory/ practice of novel reading is particularly useful to you, what makes it so?

Looking forward to the 19th century novel

One use of the novel: to offer a nuanced representation of society as a complex totality

Test case: Mary Barton (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell

• Realism questions: what are the techniques with which Gaskill attempt to describe the condition of England in a moment of economic and political crisis? (1848; advanced industrialization; reform bill);
  How does she advance the reader's understanding of how things look and feel from the point of view of the working class?
• The heteroglossia and dialogism of Bakhtin: how does Gaskell use the speech and songs and idiom of the working class to give us linguistic access to them? How, in a more general sense, does she seek to develop a dialogue across class lines?
• Nation & transnation: "the condition of England debate": how does an anatomy of classes and their antagonism find English moral solutions to an English national crisis?
• Narrative and language: why the pervasive use of the 2nd person plural in addressing the reader? This could leads to a critical interrogation of the empathy demanded from the reader; of the consensus this narrative seeks to mandate; of the sentimental economies of shared loss.
• How would you use cultural and historical analysis to understand or challenge the way Gaskell uses her tragic agency of a working class union organizer--John Barton: he becomes a political murderer in its cause, but then is stricken by conscience, and must die.
  • The solution to the love triangle problem (Mary Barton, Jeb Wilson, Mill owner's son) is political murder; the solution to the political problem of inequality is a sentimental narrative of love and redemption through loss.