Course Description: This is essentially a course on Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman as an instance of biboliomania. In order to get a sense of how the novel refuses to get in line, as it were, we will begin by randomly access Sterne's novel and attend to its publication, materials, and graphic design such as page layout, paper, drawings that are also writings, marbled pages, a two-side black page,

* * * * * * * * * alphabetic letters, arabesques, asterisks, lines, - - - - - - dashes, type font, punctuation, page layout, a two-sided marble page, diagrams of the novel in the novel,

_______ and missing chapters. We will then read it more conventionally in linear fashion startong with Volume I and ending with Volume IX. However, instead of reading the novel straight through from week to week, we will regularly interrupt our linear readings of successive volumes from Sterne' novel at irregular intervals and digress by reading literature &c. related to it, criticism on the history of the book, literary theory, and short stories by Miguel de Cervantes, a major precursor of Swift and Sterne, &c. In addition to reading a modern, scholarly paperback edition of Tristram Shandy, we will "read" / look at digital reproductions of the first edition. We will also periodically digress even further to read Victor Shkolvsky's essay "The Art of Technique," selections from work in book history, and essays in Jacques Derrida's Paper Machine and Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology. Linking literature and book history to literary theory, we will first digress to examine ____________________________

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the eccentricity of Jonathan Swift's Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books and then--and then--digress further and further &c. from Tristam Shandy by reading French, German, and Russian stories and novels haunted by Tristam Shandy, including Honoré de Balzac's The Wild Ass's Skin [Le peau de chagrin; The Skin of Sorrow]; Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist; E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr; Jean Paul Friedrich Richter's The Life of Felix Quintus (trans. Thomas Carlyle); Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus; Nikolai Leskov's "Lefty"; and Gerard de Nerval's The Salt Smugglers. We will also watch Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (dir. Michael Winterbottom, 2005, check out early forgeries and imitators, a recent graphic novel adaptation, and pay some attention both to the importance Tristram Shandy continues to play in digital literature and to Sternemania in the ninetenth-century).