Center for the Study of the Novel
The Center for the Study of the Novel promotes conversation on the novel and related narrative genres as these forms have been practiced across history and cultures. CSN is committed to the importance of studying literature as a primary form of human expression, even as it examines what interdisciplinary perspectives may tell us about literature and the novel in particular. CSN further is committed to studying the history and practice of literary criticism and theory illuminating the novel and its relations to society and culture.
Objects of inquiry include long prose fictions, the powerful cultural role played by the novel, oral forms and their relation to print culture, as well as the expansion of narrative into newer media, such as cinema and digital technologies. We attend to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of the novel and ask how the literary aspects of the novel are shaped by extra-literary contexts and other artistic paradigms. Even as CSN devotes significant attention to major works of the novelistic canon, we also study forgotten and poetically devalued novels, including those that are situated at, and help to define, the boundaries of the genre.
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Past Events
For our first event of the Winter quarter, the Center for the Study of the…
The Center for the Study of the Novel has invited professors Ato Quayson (Stanford), Richard Halpern (NYU), and John Kerrigan (Cambridge) to…
Stephen Best’s None Like Us (2018) in…
Wai Chee Dimock (Yale), Colin Milburn (Davis), John Plotz (Brandeis) What does literature have to tell us about the future of the earth in the Age of the Anthropocene?
The Ian Watt Lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel commemorates the renowned Stanford professor whose work has profoundly influenced literary study for nearly 60 years.
The Cambridge Companion to Narrative Theory, ed. Matthew Garret. Cambridge UP, 2018.
Professor McKeon is the author of The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), which won a Professional and…
One of the leading scholars of the English novel, Professor Michael McKeon (Rutgers), will speak about the genre of the novel as it relates to wide-ranging cultural and historical contexts…
CSN book discussion with Larry Buell about The Dream of the Great American Novel, with respondent, Gavin Jones.