Spanish and Portuguesevia Zoom.This event will be run in a seminar format. To receive a link to the readings, please register via this Google Form.
"No Natural Seeing": Reading with Raymond Williams Abstract from Prof. Paul Stasi: In this talk, I will look at selected passages from Raymond Williams’s The English Novel, in part as a counter to Joseph North’s recent assessment of Williams’s work in Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. For North, Williams rejects the aesthetic and, in doing so, inaugurates a turn away from an engaged literary criticism to a quietist practice of cultural analysis. I find something quite different in Williams’s re-reading of the English novelistic canon. Working against the largely individualist focus of most theories of the novel, Williams argues that novels construct “knowable communities,” a process that occurs both through the machinations of plot but also, and more importantly, at the level of form. Social history emerges here from within the text, as Williams develops a reading practice that takes the aesthetic seriously, even as it is guided by the socialist ideals that defined all his work.