Novel openings: understanding fiction through beginnings

Aims

This course aims to:

• develop close, attentive reading practices focused on prose fiction
   
• build a critical vocabulary for analysing narrative
   
• compare different historical and formal approaches to the problem of narrative beginnings to develop an understanding of the history of the English novel

Course content

An opening does not simply set a story in motion; it establishes assumptions about reality and invention; about authority, voice, and time; and about what a reader is being asked to believe. This course takes novel openings seriously as acts of thinking. It asks how writers use the first pages of fiction to define the terms on which their narratives will proceed.

We’ll investigate that question through close readings of some remarkable opening passages in English fiction. Moving across the major literary movements of the past two centuries – realism, modernism, and postmodernism – the course examines how different traditions rethink the simple but consequential problem of how to start a story. We will not, however, move simply chronologically through these movements – as in the traditional survey of the history of the novel – but pair earlier with later texts, such that distinctive openings from across the past two-and-half centuries can illuminate each other.

Perennial questions will emerge from these comparisons: What does it mean to begin in a world assumed to be stable? How does a novel open when authority is uncertain, or when narrative itself has become an object of suspicion?

Each class will focus on two openings, read closely and in comparison. Short excursions into narrative theory will provide points of orientation, but the emphasis throughout will fall on the writing: on tone, syntax, pacing, and the forms of expectation these beginnings create. The aim is not to master a history of the novel, but to sharpen attention to those moments when fiction pauses, before the story properly begins, to think about its own means of storytelling.

What to expect on this course

Each session will focus on two beginnings, studied both individually and in comparison, and discussed in detail. Sessions will begin with a brief introduction to the authors and questions at stake, followed by extended discussion of the passages themselves. You do not need any specialist training studying literature but being a regular and enthusiastic reader of fiction will be an advantage.

You should be willing to read attentively, think aloud, and engage with other readers’ responses. The atmosphere is exploratory rather than competitive, and the aim is to develop confidence as a reader by working through difficult or surprising passages together. By the end of the course, you should expect not only to have encountered a range of striking and influential novel openings, but to have sharpened habits of reading that extend beyond them.

Course sessions

1. Jane Austen and J. M. Coetzee
   How do openings establish authority?
2. George Eliot and Virginia Woolf
   How do openings fashion characters?
3. Elizabeth Gaskell and Zadie Smith
   How do openings represent societies?
4. Charles Dickens and Thomas Pynchon
   How do openings create scale?
5. Laurence Sterne and Vladimir Nabokov
   What does it mean for a novel to resist the act of opening?

Learning outcomes

As a result of the course, you will gain a greater understanding of the subject and you should be able to:

• develop a more articulate appreciation of prose fiction and its formal strategies
• become familiar with the history of the English novel and its major theories
• practise close comparative reading with attention to voice, time, and narrative implication

Required reading

The opening passages of the novels we will discuss will be provided to you as extracts shortly before the beginning of the course. You are not required to read on beyond these extracts, but may find yourself inspired to do so; if you wish to start reading in advance, these are the editions we’ll use:

Jane Austen, Persuasion (Penguin Classics, 2006)

J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (Vintage)

George Eliot, Middlemarch (Penguin Classics, 2003)

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford Worlds Classics, 2000)

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (Oxford World’s Classics, 2011)

Zadie Smith, NW (Penguin, 2013)

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (Penguin Classics, 2003)

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (Vintage, 1995)

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Oxford World’s Classics, 2009)

Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (Penguin Classics, 2016)