Interaction

Oct. 19, 2005

A novel idea

Margaret Cohen, director of the Center for the Study of the Novel and a professor in the
Department of French and Italian, is deeply committed to the idea that the novel is grounded
in material life. Photo: L.A. Cicero

The novel is the literary form that bespeaks modernity. One begat the other, which is a way of saying that the study of the novel is the study of our modern world. That nexus defines Stanford's Center for the Study of the Novel.

"I'm interested in realism," says Margaret Cohen, the center's director. Realism, she points out, is the genre most associated with the 19th-century novel, the literary creation whose culture, language, setting and ethos are inseparable from modern cities and nations. The world of cities and nations emerges through realism.

Cohen spent the 2004-05 academic year as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center working on her latest exploration of the conjoined realms of literature and modernity. "The Romance of the Sea" is the working title for her newest project, a study of literature, waterways, ocean travel and the maritime.

Like her predecessor, Center for the Study of the Novel founder Franco Moretti, Cohen, a professor in the Department of French and Italian, is deeply committed to the idea that the novel is grounded in material life. The maritime, she explained in her introductory comments at an April conference devoted to "The Maritime in Modernity," plays a role in many interdisciplinary paradigms: flows, circulation and exchange are at the heart of economic, cultural and social intercourse, and thus at the heart of modern literature.

Professor Franco Moretti founded the center and served as its previous director. Photo L.A. Cicero

"Strange as it seems, no other university in the world has a center for the study of the novel like ours," says Moretti, the Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor and a professor of English. "At times the simplest things are the most complicated to imagine. There's no other place in the world that has a similar flow of international and national specialists on the novel. By and large, all the people who do great work, they've all been here."

The center was established by Moretti when he arrived at Stanford in 2000. Each year it holds two conferences, the Ian Watt Lecture on the History of the Novel (whose speaker is chosen by graduate students) and two "Book Conversations," at which a visiting author is at the center of a free-ranging and, according to Cohen, "quite unpredictable" group discussion.

The topics of the upcoming conferences make it clear that Cohen, who says she's interested in "the edges of the novel," is very serious about understanding the form in a wide context while not neglecting what she calls "the specificity of literary studies within the humanities." The core and the periphery of the discipline, in other words, are not mutually exclusive, but sometimes the core gets neglected amid enthusiasm for exploring the outlying areas.

In November, the conference on "Adventure" will draw visitors from English departments and film studies, along with chaos theory pioneer and physicist J. Doyne Farmer. Farmer (Stanford B.S. '73) currently teaches at the Santa Fe Institute, a private, nonprofit, independent and multidisciplinary research center. He and his co-panelists will discuss Oriental romance, the picaresque and science fiction, to name just a few excellent adventures.

That will be followed in January with a gathering devoted to "Illustration"; speakers will be scholars housed in literature, film and art departments.

Cohen has moved the center along a more interdisciplinary path than Moretti, who acknowledges he started cautiously in that respect, though even within the tidier confines of literature per se there were some standout meetings on his watch. "Teaching Narratives," for example, featured papers by an elementary school teacher, a high school teacher, a community college instructor and a university professor.

"I love what Margaret is doing," Moretti says. "It's different than what I did."

One of the heavy hitters visiting this year will be Pascale Casanova, who drew international praise (and controversy) for The World Republic of Letters, first published in France in 1999. Like Cohen and Moretti, Casanova overlays literature and maps as a way of understanding inseparable cultural and power relations. "Nothing like this has been attempted before," philosopher and critic Perry Anderson wrote in the London Review of Books, noting "the geographical range of Casanova's materials, from Madagascar to Romania, Brazil to Switzerland, Croatia to Algeria." (Anderson will be one of the commentators at the February Book Conversation featuring Casanova.)

Using the world-systems theory developed by sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (upon which Moretti also bases his most recent work), Casanova essentially looks at literature as a problem of globalization, in the current sense of the word. Inequality, capital accumulation and struggle between core and periphery are all invoked to explain and analyze literary production, which exists in a constant tension between universalization and fragmentation. In the words of a critic in The Nation, "She has created a map of global literary power relations where none had existed."

Like Casanova and Cohen, Moretti has a global perspective, which, almost by definition, is interdisciplinary. To the economic relations of world-systems theory he adds the theory of evolution, the idea being that the world's multiple literary forms are the result of historical divergence along different trunks. Geography, too, plays an important role in his analysis; he maps novels to allow patterns and ideas to emerge that otherwise would remain hidden.

Though Moretti and Cohen may gaze over the horizon, they are both cognizant that the center is, as Moretti put it, an institution and "not a book that Margaret and I are writing together." It is a place, above all, where Stanford graduate students can get exposure to a wide range of scholars and establish bonds with their fellows at nearby universities. Susan Schuyler, one of Cohen's two assistants at the center, says there are few of her colleagues who do not cross boundaries in their work. How does that manifest itself? Sources, she answers quickly. Look at what evidence a scholar examines to make a literary argument, and you'll see how he or she understands the world.

Schuyler and her colleagues have picked Bill Brown to be the next Ian Watt Lecturer. (Watt was an early leader of both the Stanford Humanities Center and the Modern Thought and Literature Program.) Brown (Stanford Ph.D. '89) is a professor of English at the University of Chicago and a member of its Committee on the History of Culture. He has described his research as taking place at the intersection of literary, visual and material cultures; he has written about, among other things, baseball, dime Westerns and consumption.

Add all that in with world-systems theory and the maritime, and you've got some very, very interdisciplinary things going on.

"We've made this center, which nobody else has, with a director with no salary and two graduate students and some staff assistance from the English Department," Moretti says.

"We have been an inspiration to many universities. We have received so many e-mails over the years from around the world from people wanting to come here to work, not realizing that the center is a small room with no windows."

But what a view.