Course Objectives & Requirements

The Novel Against Cruelty: Representations of the Individual's Responsibility in the Face of Suffering
The novel, a literary invention of the modern world, serves as a flexible genre that not only develops from, but also responds to, the conditions of modernity. This course will review major authors of the genre from the nineteenth century forward to understand how texts represent historically contingent forces of oppression. These texts use representation to perform the Nietschean critique of morality, to envision the role of the individual within a community. This course will examine how the texts idiosyncratically employ literary conventions to create an awareness of suffering unique to the socio-historical context and to comment on the responsibility of the individual in the face of suffering.


This course seeks to understand how fiction (a construction of setting, characters, plot, symbolism, conflict, tone & style, and point of view), and especially the novel (a genre that represents the individual's experience of society) can be constructed in a way that calls attention to the ambiguous nature of cruelty and suffering in society and the ambiguity of the individual's relationship to these. Such constructions serve as critiques of the the epistemological limitations of ethical values. Such texts create an implicit imperative for the individual (the audience as well) to recognize the inscrutability of human experience and an imperative to adjust behavior accordingly, i.e., behave toward others with diffidence. Such constructions seek to not only highlight the conditions of cruelty, but through the nuanced, multifaceted representations to avoid the discursive cruelty often associated with treatment of such themes. This course looks at texts that take as their setting social conditions of blatant cruelty. We will examine how these fictions are constructed in a way to destabilize conventionally understood ethical values.