Henry James: The Shorter Fiction

A reading-intensive, condensed study of one of the English language’s great novelists of consciousness, who by renouncing omniscient narration developed an idiosyncratic style, and influential techniques, through which to chart the shapes, and limits, of modern subjectivity. We will read some of James’s most popular shorter works— short stories, novellas, and two short novels— as a way of surveying, within seven weeks, his characteristic interests: how we know (and don’t know) our own desires; the moral peril of idealizing innocence, and the equal dangers of knowingness; what a society stratified by social class does to our sense of ourselves; what “evil” might be in a secular world.