Modern fiction in English begins with the work of Henry James (1843-1916), an American novelist who spent most of his life in Europe, with England as his home and the French novel as his inspiration. James crucially altered the method of English fiction by always narrating from a clear point of view. Inevitably this introduced to the novel an element of mystery, for no individual narrator can know everything, even about himself.
James was also a master of the novella – the kind of tale that is shorter than a novel but longer than a short story – and many of his major themes are developed in it. The present course will focus on three of the most famous of these tales, each of which deals with a characteristically Jamesian subject.
Daisy Miller is a treatment of what James called ‘the international theme’: of the exposure of American innocence, as he saw it, to the worldliness of European culture. It is a broadly comic tale that surprisingly builds to a tragic conclusion. In The Lesson of the Master, a young novelist learns that the aspiration to represent life truthfully is not compatible with living a full life; the artist must be always at a remove, dedicated to his work before all else. The Aspern Papers, one of several Jamesian excursions into Venice, touches on conflicts that crop up in both the other tales: the conflict between Europe and America and that between art and life. More centrally, it is concerned with what for James is the primary form of evil: the desire to take possession, in some way, of another human being.
The first four classes will be devoted to detailed study of the texts, the fifth being reserved for a broader, more comparative discussion.
