Literature - Winter 1998

What are novels and where do they come from? What is the history of the so-called romance novel? And what is the basis of its popularity in Western culture? We will attempt to answer these questions by taking a close look at a form of prose fiction that became popular in the ancient Mediterranean. Written in Greek, the plots of these narratives combine a mixture of romantic love and adventure in which the hero and heroine are always young, well-born, and handsome or beautiful. So what happens? The two lovers are separated, of course! And the remainder of the story is about their travels in distant lands, their spectacular misfortunes, and their eventual reunion. In one episode, a lover must watch his beloved be disemboweled only to find that he has been tricked by a visual sleight of hand; fake deaths are a common occurrence in these tales. So is the appearance of bandits or pirates who pose a constant threat to the heroine's virginity. If this sounds like the plots of Harlequin romances, you have discovered why these ancient works are often called erotic "romances." At the same time they provide a rich and rewarding reading experience.

In this class we will read a selection of these works (in English) with attention paid to their cultural context, their audiences, the construction of gender in the ancient world, the representation of foreigners and foreign travel, the relationship between sex and violence, and between visual and textual traditions. We will consider the "origins" and history of the novel form and its modern reception. Until very recently these texts have been considered outside the mainstream of the traditional canon and are not often read in undergraduate literature courses; to some extent they retain their position as "outsiders." Therefore, we will necessarily be concerned with the factors that determine the inclusion or exclusion of a given test within the Western literary canon. This course is designed for students who are interested in literary history, in theoretical and cultural approaches to literary texts, and in Western antiquity and its contemporary forms (our thoughts may turn to Xena, Disney's Hercules). This course is open to all interested students. It satisfies the General Education Code IH.

There will be a midterm and a final exam and three several short papers required throughout the quarter.

Primary Readings are to be found in B. P. Reardon, ed. Collected Ancient Greek Novels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. They are:

• Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe
• Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon
• Longus, Daphnis and Chloe
• Heliodorus, An Ethiopian Story
• Pseudo-Lucian, The Ass

In addition, a Reader of relevant secondary readings will be provided. This will include a selection from the following list:

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "The Greek Romance," in The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 86-110.

Barns, J.W.B. "Egypt and the Greek Romance." In Mitteilungen aus der Papyrussammlung de Nationalbibliothek in Wien, 29-36. New Series 5. 1956.

Bartsch, S. Decoding the Ancient Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

Elsom, Helen E. "Callirhoe: Displaying the Phallic Woman." In Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin. 212-230. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Hägg, Toman. The Novel in Antiquity. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, English Edition 1983.

Holzberg, Niklas. The Ancient Novel, An Introduction. Translated by Christine Jackson-Holzberg. London and New York: Routledge, English Edition 1995.

Konstan, David. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Montague, Holly. "Sweet and Pleasant Passion: Female and Male Fantasy in Ancient Romance Novels." In Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, ed. Amy Richlin. 231-249. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Morgan, J.R. "Make-believe and Make Believe: The Fictionality of the Greek Novels." In Lies and Fiction in the Ancient World, ed. Christopher Gill and T.P. Wiseman. 175-229. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Morgan, J.R. and Richard Stoneman, ed. Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Perry, B.E. "Greek Romance and the Problem of Forms and Origin," in The Ancient Romances. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, pp. 3-43.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance, Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984.

Tatum, James, ed. The Search for the Ancient Novel. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Winkler, J.J. "The Education of Chloe." In Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece, 101-126. Routledge, 1989.

Zeitlin, Froma. "The Poetics of Eros: Nature, Art and Imitation in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe." In Before Sexuality, ed. Froma Zeitlin and John Winkler. 417-464. Princeton: Princeton Univesity Press, 1990.

Revised 7/12/04.