We are very excited to kick off the semester with the first in a series of workshop-style meetings that will focus on graduate student work on novel form. Next week we will be reading an article by our colleague Troy Smith on H.C. Andersen and the aesthetics of the Bildungsroman.

We will meet in the Comparative Literature conference room in 4125 Dwinelle Hall at 5pm on Thursday, January 25.

You can find the article attached. Troy has asked us to give special attention to some particular passages: pages 37-43 and pages 48-52. Our discussion will focus mostly on these page ranges.

Troy has also pointed to some concepts that come up in the article and might guide our discussion:

• The aesthetics of autonomy and the Bildungsroman
• Leonard F. Lisi’s “aesthetics of dependency” and the differences between novel form and drama
• metaphysics and the conditions of fictional narrative

These workshops give participants the opportunity to receive feedback on their written work from other members of the Consortium. If you would like to have your work be the focus of future workshops, please do come to the meeting and propose a topic. Revised seminar papers, conference presentations, dissertation chapters, and journal articles…all scholarly genres are viable for the workshop format.​

We look forward to seeing you there! Please let us know if you have any questions in the meantime.