Course Description

History 540

Research Seminar

Europe in the 20th Century

Dr. Dennis

This research seminar will assess the value of modern novels as resources for writing twentieth-century European history. We will commence with a review of the “linguistic turn” in intellectual historiography and some recent responses to it. Having considered new developments in intellectual history, literary theory, and the social sciences of culture, we will commonly read a selection of novels from this period and discuss their usefulness to the historian. Finally students will be asked to produce research papers based on careful consideration of a single text’s various contexts. While prospective Europeanists are encouraged to study novels in their original language, we will concentrate on works in translation.

Possible readings:

Method

David Cowart, History and the Contemporary Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1989)

Richard Humphrey, The Historical Novel as Philosophy of History: Three German Contributions: Alexis, Fontane, Döblin (London: Humanities Press, 1986)

P. J. Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875-1914 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1989)

Dominick LaCapra, History, Politics, and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell, 1987)

Gyorgy Lukacs, The Historical Novel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983)

The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems, Perspectives (New York: Berg, 1991)

Harold Orel, The Historical Novel from Scott to Sabatini: Changing Attitudes toward a Literary Genre, 1814-1920 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995)

William Ray, Story and History: Narrative Authority and Social Identity in the Eighteenth-Century French and English Novel (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990)

Novels

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Alfred Döblin, The November Revolution (trilogy)

Alfred Döblin, Berliner Alexanderplatz

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

Albert Camus, The Plague

Günther Grass, The Tin Drum

Günther Grass, Local Anaesthetic

Günther Grass, The Rat

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus

Elsa Morante, History: A Novel