ENGL 16
Henry James' The Golden Bowl Winter 2019
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

In this course we will read Henry James’ late novel, The Golden Bowl, which dramatizes many of James’ crucial preoccupations. Centered on a wealthy American collector living in England at the turn of the twentieth century, the novel examines the personal and cultural costs of an American obsession with amassing relics of a collapsing European empire, as well as the potentially ruinous effects of wealth and refined sensibility on tangled love relations. The novel’s ethical and perceptual intricacies are conveyed in an ingeniously demanding style that presses syntax to its limits. We will read critical essays on the novel, and draw on Walter Benjamin’s work on collecting and on the Arcades of 19th-century Paris.