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Dorothy J. Hale
University of California, Berkeley
Visiting Professor, Literary Theory and Comparative Studies
University of Sao Paulo
Spring 2013
Henry James and the Development of Anglo-American Novel Theory
Graduate Lectures
Thursday, May 9
Reading 1: Henry James: Novel Theory and Practice
Fiction: “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896).
Nonfiction:
“The Art of Fiction” (lecture 1884, o.p.1888)
Selected Prefaces from The Art of the Novel, ed. R.P. Blackmur: “The Portrait of a
Lady”; “What Maisie Knew”; The Ambassadors”; and “The Golden Bowl” (1907-8).
Tuesday, May 14
Reading 2: Chicago School Formalism and the Birth of Narratology
Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd edition, 1983 (o.p. 1961)
Part I only: chapters 1-6, pp. 3-165.
Tzvetan Todorov, “The Secret of Narrative” in The Poetics of Prose (o.p. 1971,
English translation by Richard Howard 1977), 143-178.
Recommended:
J. Hillis Miller, Reading Narrative, 1998, “The Figure in the Carpet,” 84-106.
Thursday, May 16
Reading 3: The Novel as Ideological Instrument
D.A. Miller, from The Novel and the Police, 1988
Foreword: “But Officer . . .” and Introduction: The Novel and the Police, vii-32 (rpt in
Hale, Dorothy, ed. The Novel: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2006, 542-557).
Nancy Armstrong, from Desire and Domestic Fiction, 1987
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Introduction: The Politics of Domesticating Culture, Then and Now, 3-27 (rpt in
Hale, Dorothy, ed. The Novel: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2006, 621-643).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism,” (o.p. 1985, Critical Inquiry 12, pp. 243-61), rpt in Hale, Dorothy, ed.
The Novel: An Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2006, pp. 674-690.
M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination (o.p. 1934-35)
1981 ed. Michael Holquist and trans by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, pp.
259-300 (rpt in Hale, The Novel).
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930)
Recommended: Wayne Booth, Introduction to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed.
and trans by Caryl Emerson, 1984, pp.xiii-xxvii.
Monday, May 20
Reading 4: The Novel and the New Ethics
Professor Hale’s Lecture: “What Maisie Knew and the Jamesian Aesthetics of Alterity”
Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (2004), 1-34
Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics (1995), chapters 1, 2, and 4.
Judith Butler, “Values of Difficulty,” in Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the
Public Arena, ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, pp. 199-215 (2003).
Recommended:
Lawrence Buell, Introduction: In Pursuit of Ethics, PMLA, 114, special volume
(1999).
J. Hillis Miller, “Reading Doing Reading” and “Re-Reading Re-Vision: James and
Benjamin” in The Ethics of Reading (1987)
Martha Nussbaum, “`Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral
Imagination“ and Perceptive Equilibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,”
chapters 5 and 6 of Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990),
pp.148-194.
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Tuesday, May 21
Reading 5: Identity Politics, Narrative and the Novel
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Henry Louis Gates, “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text,” chapter 5 of The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), pp.191216 (rpt in Hale, The Novel, 511-534).
Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (1987), “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in
Their Eyes Were Watching God,” 155-71 (rpt in Hale, The Novel, 258-270).
Toni Morrison, “Black Matters,” chapter 1 of Playing in the Dark (1990), 1-28.
Recommended:
Henry Louis Gates, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference it Makes,” from Loose Canons:
Notes on the Culture Wars (o.p. Critical Inquiry, 1985) 1992.
Thursday, May 23
Reading 6: The Legacy of the Jamesian Aesthetics of Alterity for the
Contemporary Novel
J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (2003)
J.M. Coetzee, “What Is A Classic?” in Stranger Shores: Literary Essays, 1986-1999
(2001), pp. 1-16.
Gayatri Spivak, “Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of
Teaching,” Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002), pp. 17-31.
Recommended:
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)
Review and Wrap Up