LS 711 - Comedy and the Novel

(3.00 cr.)

The novel was born under a comic sign: the ribald satire of Gargantua and Pantagruel; the zany burlesque of Don Quixote; the comic prose epic of Tom Jones; and the baroque playfulness of Tristram Shandy. While comedy in its generic purity has resided comfortably through the centuries in stage drama and later film, it has undergone a delightful and instructive mongrelization in narrative. This course blends historical and theoretical texts on the nature of comedy in its diverse forms with an eclectic grouping of comic novels.