Course Description
Summary
“Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last,” Samuel Johnson wrote in 1776, a decade after Laurence Sterne’s novel was published. Tristram Shandy is indeed an odd book: an autobiographical novel which takes hundreds of pages to get to the moment of its own narrator’s birth; a story which is forever interrupting itself with digressions and typographical oddities, and which admits, in the end, to its own pointlessness. But Dr. Johnson was wrong: Sterne’s novel has lasted. In this class, we’ll read Tristram Shandy and a few of its literary descendants, and consider the aesthetics and politics of pointlessness, distraction, inattentiveness, and discontinuity. Works by Sterne, Diderot, Trollope, and others.
