Senior Seminar

Today Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf are considered two of the most brilliant and inventive writers of the 20th century, challenging and redefining the form of the novel and continuing to speak to us a century later. In this seminar we will read a large selection of their works, looking at their aesthetic innovations with novelistic form as well as the philosophical, social, and historical questions they raise. Themes will include: the experience of time, the workings of memory and perception; what it means to be a self; the search for knowledge; the operations of social power; gender, race, and sexuality; the nation and empire; and the relationship of humans to nature.