CMPL 419 - Big Old Funny Books: Cervantes, Rabelais, Sterne

FC ARHU CD

4 credits
The early modern European novel revels in what the classical epic shunned: learned wit, bodily functions, and something like a comic philosophy of life. This course will read in careful detail (albeit in translation) Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-34), Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-15), and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67). We will examine theories of the novel by Lukacs and Bakhtin; theories of the comic from Aristotle to Freud; and collateral texts by Borges, Foucault, and Kundera. Bring your own windmills. Taught in English.

Prerequisites: HISP 304.

This course is cross-listed with HISP-419