CMLT 290 - Rogue’s Progress: The Picaresque Experience

lways polemical: it interacts dialogically with an intelligence (a lofty pseudo intelligence) with which it polemicizes and whose mask it tears away… Stupidity in the novel is always implicated in language, in the word: at its heart always lies a polemical failure to understand someone else’s discourse, someone-else’s pathos-charged lie that has appropriated the world and aspires to conceptualize it, a polemical failure to understand generally accepted, canonized, inveterately false languages with their lofty labels for things and events: poetic language, scholarly and pedantic language, religious, political, judicial language and so forth.” From “Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination by Mikhail Bakhtin (Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans.) In this course we will explore the roots of novelistic discourse in the tradition of the picaresque, starting with trickster myths. Works read will include novels classified as picaresque and those not formally classified as picaresque but imbued with the picaresque spirit. Lazarillo de Tormes, Moll Flanders, The Gambler, Felix Krull, Dead Souls, Envy, and Lolita are among works read. (Group III) (Writing Option)