English 220 - The Voyage Within: The Novel in England from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf

What it would be like to hear the squirrel’s heartbeat, to open one’s mind fully to the sensations and impressions of the world around us? The image belongs to George Eliot, who in Middlemarch suggested we couldn’t bear it; we would die of a sensory overload, the “roar on the other side of silence.” The novelists of the generations that followed tried to live in that roar: to explore the stream of consciousness, to capture the way we make sense of experience and order out of our memory’s chaos. Readings in George Eliot, Henry James, Virginia Woolf and others.