ENG 354 PROBLEM PROTAGONISTS

This course explores a collection of nineteenth-century protagonists who generate friction with their positions at the center of a novel. If the emergence of realism promised new kinds of access to characters' inner lives, what are we to make of those protagonists who seem to resent or shy away from the attention? With help from readings in narrative theory, students will consider the stakes of centrality—what it means to occupy the center of a fiction, or one's own life—and the reasons why a novel might destabilize its choice of main character. Likely authors include Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James.