In disconnected yet overlapping lives and in complementary art forms, Henry James and Paul Cézanne traced the move from form to chaos, from structure to entropy, from certainty to uncertainty that marked the West’s entrance into the modern world.

As we read an early, a mid-phase, and late novel by Henry James, we’ll use Paul Cézanne’s art from roughly the same time periods in class to help us understand this fundamental shift from sturdy optimism to exuberant pessimism, from the hopes of empire to the loss of all we can know in the mud of Somme.

Format: lecture with some discussion.

Reading for Week #1: Henry James, THE AMERICAN (1879), chapters 1 - 13

Offered as an in-person and zoom hybrid class. You must sign up here.

A note on the texts:

James was an assiduous (pernicious?) reviser; his texts are tough to pin down. For our purposes, look for the 1879 version of THE AMERICAN, the 1881, 1882, or 1883 version of THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY, and the 1909 “New York” edition of THE AMBASSADORS—all found in the Penguin Classic editions, the Norton Critical editions, or the Library of America volumes. Steer clear of the Oxford University Press edition of THE AMERICAN and THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY; both contain late, heavily revised versions of the original novels. I’ll use the Penguin editions in class.