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This proseminar will focus on Charles Dickens’s 1860-61 novel Great Expectations. It is a rich, moving, sometimes comic, and very serious novel, and one of the undisputed “great books” in English literature.
The requirements for the course are serious close reading of the novel, participation in class discussions, weekly in-class “scribbles,” and a seminar paper on some aspect of the novel.
The novel will lead us to think about love, affection, and friendship, about self-pity, selfishness, and greed. (Take note of those commas!) Its first-person narrator will invite us into his story on occasion, and we will be able to accept that invitation, I suspect, even though it was written 150 years ago and is set in the England of 200 years ago.
Great Expectations could perhaps be seen as an historical novel, but—like all great historical novels—it is also very much about the present.
We will use the inexpensive Wordsworth edition of Great Expectations. We all need to be using the same edition of the novel. When I refer you to page 191, you will want to find Joe Gargery telling Pip that “life is made of ever so many partings welded together.”
Bert Hornback |
