Why do we read novels? Why did people in the past read novels? How has the history of novel-reading shaped the way we think about ourselves, about other people, and about the world? In order to answer these questions, this course covers the long history of the novel in English considered as an aesthetic form, as a record of social life, and as the scaffolding on which which we build our experience of the world.

This course engages with the long history of the novel in English, stretching from its eighteenth-century origins to its Victorian and Modernist incarnations through its post-colonial and post-modernist reconfigurations, with particular attention paid to the novel's production, circulation, reception, and materiality, and to digital methods for analyzing both individual texts and larger corpora. See the course syllabus for a more extended overview of the major concerns and theoretical frameworks engaged in this course.

By the end of the semester you will be able to close read a novel (and explain why, given the history of close reading and novels, this is a strange thing to do); understand the place of literary criticism in literary history; tell multiple stories about the history of prose fiction in English and construct your own; construct a corpus and perform basic text analysis on it; and interpret material form as aspect of literary meaning. Final project options include work with natural language processing and social media platform design.

This class is suggested for readers, writers, critics, and reviewers of fiction, fans of experimental-genre literary criticism, aspiring librarians and information scientists, and students interested in exploring humanities applications of computational techniques.

Assignments includes instructions and materials for a series of computationally-assisted text analysis exercises, along with material contextualizing these exercises within various literary-critical debates regarding the novel, scholarly canons, and the digital humanities. Assignment 8 exercises was developed in collaboration with Richard Wicentowski (Swarthmore, Computer Science) and taught in Rise and in CS21 in collaboration Swarthmore CS faculty in Fall 2018.

Rachel Sagner Buurma | rbuurma1 at swarthmore dot edu| rachelsagnerbuurma.org

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