AJL24251 Henry James and his Critics

Faculty of Arts
Spring 2022
Extent and Intensity
0/2/0. 6 credit(s). Type of Completion: zk (examination).
Teacher(s)
doc. Michael Matthew Kaylor, PhD. (lecturer)
Mgr. Michal Mikeš (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
prof. Mgr. Jan Chovanec, Ph.D.
Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Tomáš Hanzálek
Supplier department: Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts
Timetable
Mon 16:00–17:40 G32
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is also offered to the students of the fields other than those the course is directly associated with.
The capacity limit for the course is 20 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 1/20, only registered: 0/20, only registered with preference (fields directly associated with the programme): 0/20
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Course objectives
Henry James is regularly identified as a transitional writer, making not only the spatial crossing from his American youth to his adult years in Europe but also the stylistic crossing from the realist idiom of nineteenth-century literature to the formal density and explorations of consciousness that have routinely aligned his late works with the rise of modernism. In the course of these transitions, James produced some of the masterpieces of Anglo-American fiction, including The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Ambassadors and The Turn of the Screw. This course examines James’s oeuvre in part through the love affair it has inspired in critics of every theoretical persuasion. Reading a series of notable interpretations of James’s fiction alongside the works analyzed will help us to pose the question: “Whose James?” For instance, James features as a key example in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), a book that founded Queer Theory as an academic discipline. James’s writing plays an equally pivotal role in Bill Brown’s groundbreaking A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (2003), a work which established Material Culture Studies as a new discourse in contemporary literature departments. Shosana Felman uses James’s great novella The Turn of the Screw to justify the controversial practice of Deconstruction in her canonical essay, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Likewise, James’s writing is a fixture in prominent Freudian, Foucauldian and Feminist readings. In light of his utility to contradictory doctrines, it isn’t surprising that James himself is a subject of intense controversy. Should we view James as the elite formalist, the artist in the ivory tower, presented by Jean-Christophe Agnew and Eric Savoy, or, as today’s scholars tend to argue (in keeping with the broader academic shift from new criticism and structuralism to post-structuralism and cultural studies), should we consider James an engaged social critic!? Perhaps no question has provoked more disagreement than James’s positions on sexuality and on women. Do we agree with John Carlos Rowe that James derided the “woman’s fiction” he grew up reading? Do we side with Victoria Coulson’s vehement objection to such claims as “tone-deaf” to James’s “anguish and solidarity . . . at . . . scenes of feminine struggle”, a view which, in turn, echoes Peggy McCormack’s argument that James possessed intense feminist sympathies aligned with the concerns of female authors? Or, finally, do we incline toward Donatello Izzo’s thesis that James was a Foucauldian avant la lettre whose characterizations exhibit a progressive awareness of gender’s discursive determinations? This course, taught jointly by doc. Michael M. Kaylor and Mgr. Michal Mikeš, gives you a chance to join the exceptionally rich critical debate on the work of a great author. And we ask you to take that challenge quite literally. Please enroll only if you intend to come to class prepared and to participate in the conversation. This seminar is reserved as a discussion forum for those who want the opportunity for more engagement than lecture-style courses allow.
Learning outcomes
At the end of the course, students will be able to critically evaluate the canonical, stylistic, socio-cultural, and other issues surrounding a writer such as Henry James, discuss the writings of others with sensitivity and appreciation, and have a greater understanding of the contexts of Pan-Atlantic English literature from the Victorian to Modernist periods.
Syllabus
  • Week 1: Introduction: Read “Henry James and the American Ideal (and the Atlantic Monthly)”. Week 2: Read Portrait of a Lady (1881), Part I, chapters 1-27; “Beyond the Victorians” by Stuart Hutchinson; “The Rule of Money” by Peggy McCormack. Week 3: Read Portrait of a Lady, Part II, chapters 28-55; “Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure” by Tessa Hadley; “Portrait of a Novel” in The Guardian; “Portrait of a Novel” in the New Yorker. Week 4: Further discussion of Portrait of a Lady. Week 5: Read Spoils of Poynton (1897), Part I; “A Thing about Things in Henry James” by Bill Brown; “Ethnography of Manners” by Nancy Bentley. Week 6: Read Spoils of Poynton, Part II; “Sticky Realism” by Victoria Coulson. Week 7: Read Turn of the Screw (1898); Read “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” by Shosanna Felman (all parts). Week 8: Further discussion of Turn of the Screw. Week 9: Read Beast in the Jungle (1903); “Beast in the Closet” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; “Male Subjectivity at the Margins” by Kaja Silverman. Week 10: Read The Golden Bowl (1904), Book First, chapters I-XII; “Golden Bowl as Moral Philosophy” by Martha Nussbaum. Week 11: Read The Golden Bowl, Book First, chapters XIII-XXIV; “Love and Power in Henry James” by Mark Selzer. Week 12: Read The Golden Bowl, Book Second, chapters XXV-XXXIII; “Jamesian Sadomasochism” by Leland S. Person. Week 13: The Golden Bowl, Book Second, chapters XXXIV-XLII; “Maggie Verver: The Difficulty of Ending” by Ruth Yeazell.
Teaching methods
Please enroll only if you intend to come to class prepared and to participate in the conversation. This seminar is reserved as a discussion forum for those who want the opportunity for more engagement than lecture-style courses allow.
Assessment methods
Assessment: Attendance and Participation in Class Discussion 30%, Final Essay 70%. Final essays should be 12-15 pages double-spaced in MLA format.
Language of instruction
English
Further Comments
Study Materials
The course is taught once in two years.
The course is also listed under the following terms Spring 2020, Spring 2024.
  • Enrolment Statistics (Spring 2022, recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/phil/spring2022/AJL24251