- Trainer/in: Patrick Jones
What
is the relationship between literature and life? As the oeuvres of
Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf readily attest, this question haunted
some of modern literature’s most well-known authors. But of all of them,
no one responded to it as insistently and with the same depth of
philosophical attention as Henry James. In this seminar we will explore
some of these responses through close readings of a selection of his
short stories and essays. What will emerge is a portrait of James that
is quite different from that normally painted by critics, who have
tended to exaggerate his commitment to the formalist idea that “art
makes life, makes interest, makes importance”. Instead, we will meet a
more ambivalent James who is profoundly interested in how we make sense
of and give form to our lives, and the ways in which literature can both
enrich, and disturb, this process