The 20th Century Novel: A Brief Reading List
A few years ago I taught my first undergraduate course in comparative literature, a course I taught twice during my time at Stony Brook: The 20th Century novel. This course was a relatively new addition to the courses we were offering at the time. Our curriculum had been revamped to reflect the departmental focus on more contemporary literary issues, in contrast to a previous focus on the once traditional classical or Greco-Roman literature. Each time I taught the course I taught it differently, depending on where my focus was that year. The 20th century novel is an enormous corpus and it would be impossible, particularly in a comparative context (delimited in comparison to national iterations of this course that might focus on U.S. literature only, for example).
The first time I taught the course as a fairly standard survey of the entire twentieth century, with half the texts coming from the first half of the 20th century and the rest coming from Post-45, a common periodization for 20th century literature. The second time I taught the course, I decided to focus less on a temporal survey, and, rather, to do a close survey of the first half of the 20th century with a focus on textual innovation up until the 1930s. My goal in this course was to give students a sense of the rapid evolution of the novel from 1900 to 1940 (our latest work was Colette’s 1945 novela Gigi), a period with many schools of writing and artistic and intellectual movements. Even within this period of time it would be impossible to cover everything, but my goal was to give my students a taste of the formal (by which I mean the form) innovation that occurred in novel writing, to set the stage for what could be a lifelong exploration of the novel as a genre. At the same time, this course was more focused on selecting texts from New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires, my three cities that I research. I wanted to illustrate for my students a small taste of what it would feel like to be a comparative literature scholar, to look at three language traditions over the course of a semester, trying to give depth rather than breadth, though we read many works including two novels (which are not novels but they are practical in the short space of a semester, and provide their own form of comparison between two closely related genres).
I had intended on posting this list at a later date, when I had done individual recommendations of each of the novels I taught, but since many of us are trapped at home and there seemed to be considerable enthusiasm for my comparative literature scholarship reading list, here is a list of the novels I have paired for beginning comparative literature students during my time as an instructor at Stony Brook University.
20th century novels can be quite a challenge to read so I organized these texts in order of ease so that there would be a feeling of transition as we moved from the more commercial forms of fiction to the formally innovative. The Argentine texts were particularly difficult to select because translation of Argentine literature prior to the late 20th century “Boom authors” is extremely limited. The Argentine texts that have been translated, far from being representative of the dominant novels and schools of thought of their day, tend to stand out for their uniqueness and formal innovation. Keeping that in mind, here is my list. It is not comprehensive, and certainly there are many ways to re-organize these texts, add and take away, but think of this as a sort of starter set and we’ll keep building, shuffling, and reorganizing here in the library.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Published in 1925, The Great Gatsby is an iconic work of Jazz Age American fiction, setting the stage for how many of us continue to view New York to this day. This tends to be a favorite with students, who often cite having seen the recent Baz Lehrman adaptation as their entry point into the novel. It is the most traditional novels students read during the course as well as one of the most influential works in U.S. fiction. To this day it continues to shape how we view the New York of the 1920s.
Passing by Nella Larsen
Published in 1928, Passing is a canonical work of the Harlem Renaissance. It is a novela rather than a novel, making it just a little briefer than The Great Gatsby. It is a unique critical take on the tragic mulatta novel featuring two female characters who knew each other as children and re-encounter each other while passing for white in a rooftop restaurant in Chicago. While the novel opens in Chicago, it takes place in New York and represents black bourgeois life at the turn of the century while also posing an important argument against racial essentialism. Something I like students to pay attention to in Passing is the combination of free-indirect discourse paired with the representation of an unreliable main character (Irene). At the beginning of the novela we have no reason to question Irene’s perspective, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly apparent that her perspective is just that, a perspective, rather than an objective point of view, tinting the third person narrative with this same unreliability in a way that makes the ending of the novel endlessly interesting to discuss with students. To familiarize yourself with the unreliable narrator as a figure and narrative device in storytelling I recommend reading Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” to supplement your reading of Passing. We read this poem in class during the Passing unit and, in addition to being an iconic example of the unreliable narrator it is also a canonical work of literature in English and British literature.
Gigi by Colette In English and In French
Published in 1945, Gigi is a novela set during the Belle Époque, in Paris. It is a later work by one of France’s most popular novelists of the period. Colette’s early fiction (written during the Belle Époque as well) were unprecedented commercial successes while her later fiction won her a place amongst the literary elite. On the surface Gigi reads like a frivolous portrayal of Belle Époque excess, following the dramatic coming of age of a jeune fille in a family of demimondaines. It is a traditional romantic comedy, but in Colette’s hands it is also a critique of French class-structures and gender roles. It is a novela that improves and becomes more complex with each reading.
Mad Toy by Roberto Arlt in English and in Spanish
Published in 1926, Mad Toy is a unique event in Argentine literary history. Roberto Arlt, the son of working class immigrants, writes a working class novel for the people during a time when the cultural elite of Buenos Aires were writing national fictions about the gaucho. The novel is a grim coming of age tale of a boy with no material advantages in life who, in spite of his obvious talent is offered no opportunities for advancement in Buenos Aires society. When he finally appears to get a break, to qualify to advance, that opportunity is taken from him. It is a novel about the brutal social realities of a forgotten class and is often read as a roman à clef, a work of fiction that is heavily autobiographical. Arlt, himself, was a prolific writer, writing not only a handful of canonical works of Argentine fiction but also as a columnist and playwright.
While the first three novels present fairly straight forward and recognizable narratives, Mad Toy begins our transition into more formally innovative territory. This novel usually troubles students somewhat because the main character is not particularly likable or relatable and the world the novel represents is not an optimistic one, which for students is probably profoundly destabilizing. Still, I think they find the novel interesting, engaging, and certainly thought provoking as subject for their essays. Personally, I love the first line of this novel “At the age of fourteen I was initiated into the thrilling literature of outlaws and bandits by an old Andalusian cobbler whose shoe repair shop stood next to a green-and-white-fronted hardware store in the entryway of an ancient house on Rivadavia Street between the corners of South America and Bolivia.” En español “Cuando tenía catorce años me inició en los deleites y afanes de la literatura bandoleresca un viejo zapatero andaluz que tenía su comercio de remendón junto a uno ferretería de fachada verde y blanca, en el zaguán de una casa antigua en la calle Rivadavia entre Sud América y Bolivia.” Aside from providing a brief reflection on the literature that shapes us as adolescents, this first sentence also positions us precisely in the city, a characteristic trait of urban novels. As I mentioned before, the Argentine works that get translated into English tend to be unique, stand-alone works rather than exemplifying the larger national tradition of literature, and this is definitely true of Arlt. He is generally considered to be a wholly original Argentine author.
Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
Published in 1925, the same year as The Great Gatsby, Manhattan Transfer is generally recognized as an important work of modernist literature. It is also a great novel to compare and contrast with The Great Gatsby because both Fitzgerald and Dos Passos were writing about New York City, their books were published in the same year, and they both belonged to the “Lost Generation” of American writers. Pairing The Great Gatsby and Manhattan Transfer provides a study in contrasts, illustrating how versatile New York can be as a setting in fiction. I remember one student excitedly approaching me after the first day of discussing this book, to say “this book writes New York City!” and it’s true. The work is a challenging text because it tackles trying to represent the city itself, though it does lapse into a fairly traditional urban narrative, not a U.S. narrative but a French one (I once presented a paper on its similarities to French realism at The Association of Adaptation Studies annual conference in 2016 I think, the year it was held at St. Anne’s College, Oxford). Still, the novel jumbles this more traditional narrative with a competing cacophony of other perspectives, illustrating (as modernism so often does) the subjectivity of perspective. This is an important turning point during my course because this text marks our movement away from linear, plot-driven storytelling.
Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon in English and in French
Published in 1926 (the same year as Mad Toy), Paris Peasant or Le Paysan de Paris is, even more than Manhattan Transfer an example of taking the modern urban landscape as the subject of the novel rather than characters or plots. It is a surrealist work, though Louis Aragon would later famously renounce surrealism, still, this particular work is a canonical surrealist text. Surrealism challenges the reader in terms of perspective and challenges the realist project of modernism so while it is a fitting follow up to Manhattan Transfer these works should not be read as belonging to the same school. The surrealists belong to a larger category of art known as the avant-garde. Paris Peasant is, for anyone familiar with the Parisian landscape, a wonderful trip through a lost Paris, exhibiting the ephemerality of cities, how the urban in one moment can become something completely different within less than a generation so that while it is possible for us to travel to Paris we can only travel to Aragon’s Paris by way of his writing. This is especially a must read for Francophiles and students of the novel genre. It’s a definite testing of the limits of the novel as a form.
The Museum of Eterna by Macedonio Fernandez in English and in Spanish
Our last novel was begun in 1925 but only published posthumously in 1967. It is an Argentine novel, widely regarded as Macedonio Fernandez’s best work. Fernandez is considered a vanguardía author, the Latin American avant-garde and the novel is an experimental novel, again testing the limits of what we define as a novel. If you enjoy Borges, Fernandez was supposed to have been a key influence on Borges’s writing, and, indeed, much like Baudelaire for the following generations of modern French writers, Fernandez is the precursor to much of the most recognizable Argentine fiction translated into English. I think by the time we end with Fernandez students have adjusted to narratives without character driven plots and simply allow themselves to be swept away into the immersive world of Fernandez’s novel, where brief impressions rapidly wash over the reader. Having only read the work once, so far, it is hard for me to characterize it, but I think it is a worthy endpoint for a course that seeks to give people both a taste of three national literature projects in a comparative course and in a course designed to explore and challenge how we define the novel as a genre.
Much of the popular fiction we read today is still realist in the sense that it claims to transparently and realistically represent fictional worlds. Of course, this is not literary realism in the most traditional sense, but more in the sense that most popular fiction and film stick to the recognizable realm of the plausible. The later texts in this course play with our expectations as readers in a way that lays the groundwork for postmodernism in the second-half of the century, though they are also so much more than that, or perhaps we can say in excess of the literary works of the second half of the century.
So, there you have it. Already I feel the desire to supplement, to add more works, to pull off further volumes from my shelves and add them to this stack sitting on my desk, but this post seems quite long enough and I’ll resist for today. You can find additional material on some of these works by continuing to peruse my library here at the Maison, meanwhile, I’m off to try to finally write the second post on my three part series of reflections on Gigi. Feel free to remain in my library and browse, or to take a seat and begin your readings. Help yourself to a pencil, or a notebook and pen, and if you want some suggestions on how to begin to read these works/how to begin a practice of note taking and studying literature visit my posts here, here, and here. And to learn more about Comparative Literature as a field either before or as you undertake this comparative reading list visit my reading list of literary scholarship that is foundational to the field. Stay tuned for more exercises and material related to this course.
Where I’ve linked books I’ve linked to my affiliate bookshop on bookshop.org, a nonprofit that supports independent bookstores. Should you want to support Maison Metropolitanist order through this bookshop, but I encourage you to also support your favorite indie bookstores—now more than ever. Finally, in two instances I’ve linked to Amazon where I couldn’t find the books on bookshop. I encourage you to take a look at the Spanish and French options there but to seek these books from other booksellers first.