Courses

The seminar will scrutinize four novels and three shorter works by Henry James. It will concentrate on style and structure, how James’s style developed between ‘Washington Square’ (1879) to ‘The Golden Bowl’ (1904). The four novels on the course – ‘The Portrait of a Lady’, ‘The Ambassadors’, ‘The Wings of the Dove’, ‘The Golden Bowl’ – each dramatize the same subject, a single American (or in the case of ‘The Golden Bowl’ a group of Americans) arriving in Europe to confront their destiny. As he proceeds, James narrows the perspective while deriving more energy from the intensity of the relations between the characters. He refines the narrative structure, the point of view. His late style is not a simple matter of longer and more complex sentences, but a way of rendering consciousness and describing scenes that shifts between a diction that is nuanced and a sharp use of phrasal verbs and a conversational tone.

The three shorter texts are ‘Washington Square’ and ‘The Turn of the Screw’.

The outcome for the students will be a close knowledge of these texts, with some passages studied in detail and with much emphasis on the idea of narrative structure. They will learn to look with care at the creation of scenes in James, with emphasis on his interest in configuration as much as character. They will also learn to read and study style and tone in James’s fiction as complex, requiring close attention. By the end of the semester, they will have come to see that, in the study of any literary text, making distinctions is as important as making connections.

The seminar will also look at these novels – especially ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ – in the context of other nineteenth century novels, especially George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ and ‘Daniel Deronda’, and in the light of Henry James’s ‘Hawthorne’ and some of his letters and prefaces.

Thus, the outcome for the students will include a knowledge of James as a novelist of his time and also of James as a singular figure, working in isolation, getting his energy from concerns that are pressing and personal as he seeks to dramatize what is secret and concealed, as his style itself moves between suggestion, implication and moments of pure clarity.