English 333 - Murial Spark

Robert Hosmer

T 1:00-2:50 p.m.

 

  All artists should give experience and show people how to get experience –

  to open windows and doors. If you don't do that you've failed. I'm sure

  of that.

                ---Muriel Spark

 

In nearly fifty years of novel writing, Muriel Sarah Camberg Spark (aka Dame Muriel Spark) has certainly given readers experience – experience of death, destruction, chaos, blackmail, betrayal, and bludgeoning (both of persons and reputations). Like Flannery O'Connor, her work is filled with violence, but it is never gratuitous, for like her American counterpart Spark sees everything with one eye on the here-and-now, the other on eternity.

 

Once described by David Lodge as “the most gifted novelist of her generation,” Muriel Spark has written novels, short stories, plays, biographies, collections of poetry, essays, and one volume of her autobiography. Her work – caustic, elegant, and economical – belongs to the great traditions of satire; “ridicule is the only honorable weapon we have left, “ she once declared. Though many of her novels focus on groups of women or one woman in particular, they are not to be read as “feminist,” she feels, noting “I don' t see anything special about women's writing. It's like making an anthology of blond-haired, blue-eyed writers.”

 

Be warned: Spark is a woman with an agenda: “I write as a Scot and I write as a Catholic. I don't even have to think about it. That's there like your freckles, you know,” she once told a curious interviewer. That is not to say that her novels are propaganda. For her, “fiction isn't truth – it's a type of writing from which some form of truth emerges”; and there is a spiritual secret to the work of this woman who describes herself as “Catholic in spite of the pope.” Take it or leave it, but the story is always riveting, whether of an Edinburgh school teacher with a Fascist fascination for Hitler and Mussolini ( The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ) or an elegant, artistic nun in charge of a convent that seems more like a CIA or MI5 office ( The Abbess of Crewe ) or a narcissistic, cerebrally-challenged peer who mistakenly bludgeons the nanny instead of the wife, disappearing for good or ill ( Aiding and Abetting ). Every novel Spark has written remains in print today.

 

In this seminar we will likely read eight novels with additional selections drawn from Spark's essays, poetry, and short stories, including two for children. Seminar requirements: several short papers, a major written project, and two class presentations (one will be leading discussion of a novel, the other will be presenting your project in the final class).

 Interested students must submit completed questionnaires (available in Pierce 105); enrollment limited to 12.