offered Spring 2024
Conjoining the abstract and philosophical to the material and the empirical, “Book Theory” might strike you as an oxymoron of a phrase. (One meaning of the word “bibliography,” after all, is “a list of authors and works cited”: in some contexts, “bibliography” designates the writing that you do when your paper is finished, and when your thinking has ceased.) This course, however, proposes that one way to trace the contours of twentieth-century and contemporary literary theory—especially in its post-structuralist and Marxist forms—is to zero in on theorists’ recurring engagements with the nature of print communication and with the weird ontology of the book—its conjoining of form and content and its capacity, which we experience every day as readers, to be both here and elsewhere, matter and disembodied idea. In this seminar, accordingly, we will work our way through theoretical work presenting the Western book as, variously, medium, interface, commodity, and/or technology (including technology of empire)—both classic theories (e.g., Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Curtius, Gérard Genette, Roger Chartier) and more recent ones (e.g., Andrew Piper, Jessica Pressman, Jason Scott-Warren, Kelly Wisecup). We’ll also consider such topics as print, publics, memory, ephemera, and the often-announced death of the book. To assist our collective theorizing, we’ll derive resources from artists’ books and from fiction that calls attention to its own physical platform and/or mode of transmission (e.g. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Ling Ma’s Severance, and Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate).offered Fall 2020
When, in 1792, one Charlotte Palmer published a work of fiction entitled It Is and Is Not a Novel, her choice of title, both teasing and fence-sitting, suggested a long history of generic fluidity. It also suggested that by the end of the eighteenth century this history was drawing to a close, as if the moment had arrived when it could be viewed through the lens of a certain playful self-consciousness. Our work this semester will be devoted to the record of remarkable narrative experiment preceding this moment of generic consolidation: preceding the moment, which arrived later than we might think, when a disparate range of fictions—including many calling themselves “histories”—could be categorized retroactively as examples of “the” novel and treated as “imaginative literature.” Early modern writing does a remarkable job of testing our twenty-first-century expectations about literary kinds and our twenty-first-century convictions about how those kinds relate respectively to probability, knowledge, evidence, fact, and believability. We find factually-based biographies that draw unabashedly on the conventions of the heroic romance; we find travel narratives that are part allegory, part scientific discourse; and, most interestingly for our purposes, we find fictions that claim to report the truth. These early fictions’ documentary pretenses, their affinities for matters of fact and transcripts of real life, will be one recurrent concern for this seminar. The overlap between the novelist and the juror in a legal trial (both of whom, according to Ian Watt, take a “circumstantial view of life”) will be another. Throughout the semester we’ll probe Bakhtin’s suggestion that the moment of the novel coincides with that moment when Europe is thrust out of its cultural isolation and enters into relations with the entire globe—a suggestion that helps us see why questions about empire, colonial domination, racialization and chattel slavery loom so large in this writing. And one additional question that is likely to inform our discussions goes like this: why are the secret truths of female sexuality (white and black) so often the referent of early realism?offered Spring 2018
This course investigates the rise of the novel in conjunction with the rise of modern communications networks and information technologies. It investigates this literary genre’s accounts of people’s interconnectedness alongside those projected by the postal system, the telegraph, and the radio. We’ll read widely in the history of English-language fiction—from Daniel Defoe to Jennifer Egan, by way of Sterne, Gaskell, James, and others—and in recent works of media archaeology.offered Fall 2024; Spring 2021
When, at the end of the eighteenth century, Jane Austen began to write, the novel was still liable to be dismissed by serious readers and writers on both moral and aesthetic grounds. Austen’s achievement helped to transform the genre, helping establish fiction as the form that (paradoxically enough) explains reality and as the form that explains us to ourselves. In this class we'll read all six of Austen’s novels and study the contribution they made to the remaking of modern fiction. Though our emphasis will fall on these works’ place in the literary culture of Austen’s day and on their historical contexts in an era of political, social, and literary revolution, we’ll also acknowledge the strong and ardent feelings that Austen’s oeuvre continues to arouse today. To that end, we’ll do some investigating of the frequently wild world of contemporary Austen fandom and the Austenian tourism, shopping, adaptations, and sequels that nurture it. At the same time, we’ll also remember that Austen knew fandom from both sides; part of our work this semester will be to learn about the early-nineteenth-century cultures of literary appreciation in which Austen both enrolled the heroines of her fiction and enrolled herself.offered Fall 2024; Spring 2022
This seminar explores literacy, literacy instruction, and literacy movements past and present, in theory and practice. Engaging with recent fictions and memoirs by authors such as Elena Ferrante and Ocean Vuong, with African-American slave narratives, and with materials from the history of alphabet books and children’s literature, “Literacy Stories” investigates the rich, ambivalent ways in which literature has depicted the literacy needed to consume it. Given under the auspices of the English Department and Harvard’s Mindich Program for Engaged Scholarship, “Literacy Stories” also involves collaborations with various community organizations devoted to literacy advocacy and instruction. This class will give us the opportunity to reflect—something we’ll do in part by learning about the many ways of relating to texts that flourish beyond the limits of Harvard Yard—on the contradictory ways in which we value reading. We’ll consider, for example, the friction between solitary and social reading: how the pleasures of this activity lie sometimes with how it separates us from others and sometimes with how it connects us. We will be thinking about literacy’s long-standing association with individual self-determination and thinking about how that association is put into question whenever people’s reading matter gets weaponized as an instrument of their domination. Literacy, the literary and theoretical texts on the syllabus will alike remind us, has a politics. Learning to be literate often involves experiences of unequal power relations and exclusion. Reading with (rather than “to” or “at”) others is an ethical challenge—one that all humanities concentrators and all students interested in social justice ought to explore.offered Spring 2024; Fall 2022
This foundational course for English concentrators examines literary form and genre. Together we will explore several literary “kinds” as they have changed over time, educating ourselves about the styles, shapes, and forms that writers create, critics describe, and readers learn to recognize. While looking to the great literary modes—epic, tragedy, and lyric, the three modes considered since the era of Aristotle and Plato to be literature’s foundational building blocks—we will also attend to how in moments of historical change literary styles and forms get recycled, reworked, and transformed, sometimes through mockery and satire. (Genres, we will find, are in fact historically contingent and historically variable. They change as new groups claim and/or repudiate them.) We will have other tasks this semester. We’ll ponder, for instance, the presentational differences that separate narrative from drama. We’ll work together on the habits of attention to rhythm, meter, and rhyme that will enable us to better appreciate poems as unfolding sequences of sounding words (songs and singers will therefore be important to us from week 2 through week 13). (And then, to better assess their styles, we’ll use those habits of attention on dramatists and writers of prose as well.) We’ll think, too, about the temporal and spatial structures that create narrative and how fiction writers use those structures to create worlds that both are and aren’t our own. The course integrates creative writing with critical attention. Assignments therefore involve both imagination and analysis—sometimes at the same time.offered Spring 2025; Fall 2020; Spring 2019
What was it like to read and write a novel at a moment before that term named a stable category and before the genre’s conventions were established? How did it feel to be a writer or reader in an era when the novel was (as some authors put it in the middle of the eighteenth century) “a new species” or “a new province” of writing? This class is devoted to the remarkable record of literary experimentation that forms the history of the early novel. As we study works by Aphra Behn, Mme de Lafayette, Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, and Jane Austen, we’ll attend particularly to questions of genre and genre hierarchy, fictionality and realism. To investigate what was novel about novels, we will ponder, for instance, how novels differ from epics or histories or the news in newspapers. That pondering will give us rich new insights into the formal devices that empowered this new kind of fiction as it claimed—unlike its predecessors in the narrative line—to tell the truth: a claim that would eventually, by the time of Jane Austen, underwrite the novel’s emergence as the crucial genre of modern times. At the same time, we will also investigate what this emergence can tell us about modernity itself—about love, sex, and marriage, consumer capitalism, race, and empire. We’ll cap our reading by pairing Austen’s Pride and Prejudice with an extraordinary novel in letters from 1808 (only recently rediscovered, and anonymously published), The Woman of Colour: A Tale.offered Fall 2018; Spring 2015
A class on the aesthetics and cultural politics of the Gothic tradition, from Frankenstein to Freaks. How has this tradition's fascination with those who come back from the dead mediated social anxieties about the generation of life or the lifelike? We'll consider vampire and other monster fictions by such authors as John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Gaston Leroux. We'll conclude the semester with an investigation of early horror cinema, exploring how the modern medium of cinema gave Gothic preoccupations with the animation of the dead a new lease on life.