Courses

This seminar looks at two of America’s great novelists of manners who were also good friends, writers for whom the social text of life—the play of appearances, expectations, customs, and social performances--is enigmatic and teasing, soliciting our creative attention. In our first book, James’s story “Daisy Miller,” we will see how James invites us (along with his characters) to “read” the “text” of Daisy, a young American woman creating a sensation in Rome, for she seems to defy conventional ways of behaving. Wharton’s “Roman Fever” is a kind of “companion” and tribute to James’s story and itself offers a fascinating puzzle to be deciphered. Our readings in Wharton include her brilliant short novels Summer, & Ethan Frome, and The House of Mirth, perhaps her masterpiece. Henry James was novelist who was ceaselessly experimenting and we will read three works of increasing daring--The Portrait of a Lady, “The Turn of the Screw,” and The Ambassadors, each an effort to enlarge the ambit of American fiction by representing realms of experience—female subjectivity, hallucination, “the art of taking things as they come,” respectively—hitherto rendered in conventional ways or not at all.