Senior Seminar

In this senior seminar, we will examine our assumptions regarding the study of fictional character. Long-ingrained habits have trained us not to speak of characters as though they were implied people.  We will look at the history of the taboo on reading fictional characters in this way as it develops in twentieth century criticism, asking why a conception of character as an aesthetic instrument came to predominate and why a conception of a literary character as “full person” stubbornly adheres in even the most sophisticated writing on character. Contrasting key texts in the Euro/American and Chinese traditions, we will consider cultural historical differences in means of portraying interiority, in the treatment of the relationship between major and minor characters, and in the perception of the appropriate number of characters with which to populate a novel.

Primary texts include Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Henry James,What Maisie Knew; Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; the anonymous seventeenth-century Chinese novel Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei); Cao Xueqin, Story of the Stone (Hong lou meng). Critics include Peter Brooks, Sharon Cameron, Dorrit Cohn, Ann Banfield, Alex Woloch, Blakey Vermeule, and traditional Chinese commentators. All Chinese texts will be available in English translation.