From Wikipedia:
The novel constitutes “a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in classical Greece and Rome, in medieval and early modern romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.
and
The present English word for a long work of prose fiction [novel] derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "…a story of something new.”
These definitions of the novel suggest some questions: how can a form that goes back two thousand years be “new” and how can it bring us “news”? In this class we’ll look at approx 10 novels of the last decade – by writers like Jennifer Egan, Justin Torres, Colson Whitehead, and Sigrid Nunez – to consider how contemporary novelists (and even graphic novelists) are attempting to make the form new again in response to our times and discuss how well (or otherwise) they succeed.
We'll endeavor to read both closely (considering the structure, language, characters, and plots of the books under consideration) and more expansively (considering the publishing process, and the place of the novel relative to other media, such as film and TV), always bearing in mind that novels start and end with individuals — the author and the reader. The myriad choices of the former and the responses of the latter will be our touchstones.