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Course Description

Summary

We'll be reading some of the principal works that Henry James, as a young aspiring novelist, absorbed and analyzed in the process of actively forming his own aesthetic, culminating in his first great novel, The Portrait of a Lady. It's a highly various and idiosyncratic tracing and the reading list will reflect it, drawn from among Turgenev's A Sportsman's Sketches, Eliot's Middlemarch, Maupassant's stories, Zola's Nana, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and Emerson's Self-Reliance, culminating in The Portrait of a Lady itself, where we'll take note of how the writers James embraced influenced the classic work he wrote. There will be oral presentations and brief written essays, leading to a substantive final paper. Please submit a sample, no longer than four pages, of your critical writing by the end of the day, April 29th, to dbauer@bennington.edu.