Comparative Literature 305 - STUDIES IN THE NOVEL

Topics course. This course charts the evolution of the theme of reason and its limits in the European novel of the modern era. Beginning with an examination of humanist assumptions about the value of reason in Rabelais, the course will focus on the Central European novel of the 20th Century, the age of "terminal paradoxes." Texts will include Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, Kafka's The Trial, Musil's Man without Qualities, and Kundera's The Joke, The Farewell Party, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Topic: The Philosophical Novel.