Sections offered FALL 2023:
#34865 |
HERBERT MARKS |
MW 6:30 PM–9:00 PM
|
BH 016 |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; meets with CMLT-C 313
“One cannot read a book; one can only reread it.” In this course, we shall test Nabokov’s maxim against Henry James’s late masterpiece The Golden Bowl. At the center of James’s world is the American encounter with Europe, often staged as a confrontation between innocence or virtue, on one side, and sophistication or cynicism, on the other. The Golden Bowl revisits this theme with an intensity and a subtlety unprecedented in European fiction. Its nuanced language provides the vehicle for acute psychological insights, labyrinthine turns of plot, a heightened sense of moral urgency, and an obsessive attention to literary form. We shall read the novel twice, which is all that time allows, but we shall also discuss several of James’s own meditations on the art of fiction and a selection of critical views. In the process, we shall try to chart the psychological and cognitive differences between a first and a second reading, considered more broadly.
Written work: a close analysis of a short passage to be presented in class and a final essay.
Preparation: to give us a point of reference for thinking about The Golden Bowl, please come to the first meeting having read The Portrait of a Lady, James’s most famous work, written twenty-five years earlier.