Center for the Study of the Novel
Department of English
Margaret Jacks Hall 460-403
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2087
Tel: (650) 725-4165
Fax: (650) 725-0755
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Literature at Stanford
We recommend that visitors use the lot next to the Cantor Arts Center (off Palm Drive) or the lot behind Memorial Auditorium (off Galvez). Both are a 5 minute walk from Margaret Jacks Hall and feature "pay and display" machines that accept cash, coins, or credit cards; place your receipt on your dashboard. For more information see the web sites above.
The Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts, established in 2006, serves as the core programmatic hub for the Stanford Arts Initiative, leading the development of new undergraduate arts programs, hosting artists in residence, awarding grants for multidisciplinary arts research and teaching, incubating collaborative performances and exhibitions with campus partners and other institutions, and providing centralized communication for Stanford arts events and programs.
The Center for the Study of the Novel promotes conversation on the novel, as this seminal literary form has 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. Our inquiry examines the novel as a fundamental literary expression of modernity, and also asks about the powerful cultural role played by narrative beyond the novel, whether it is the oral forms that precede print culture or 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, CSN is also committed to the importance of studying forgotten and poetically devalued novels, and novels that are situated at, and help to define, the boundaries of the genre.
CSN's primary venue is a yearly series of events which bring speakers from across the US and beyond to address audiences from the literature and related departments at Stanford, as well as from across the Bay Area. CSN was founded by Franco Moretti in 2000, who was its director 2000-2004. Events across his directorship charted the contours of the novel across geography and history. Under the leadership of Margaret Cohen, director from 2004-2007, the center focused on how the novel edges other media, genres, and forms. It is currently directed by Alex Woloch.
The Center hosts annual conferences each year, as well as the series, Books at the Center, which brings authors of recent influential critical books to discuss their work in the company of distinguished critics. The Ian Watt lecture on the History and Theory of the Novel presents an annual opportunity to discuss core intellectual issues surrounding the novel and its study, commemorating the renowned Stanford professor whose work has profoundly influenced literary study for nearly 50 years. Graduate students in Stanford's Department of English and Division of Literature, Cultures and Languages, select the speaker. Speakers are not limited to works of any specific nation, language, or historical period and are encouraged to engage critical theories of the form and to contest definitions of the novel itself. Past speakers have included Bill Brown, Catherine Gallagher, Fredric Jameson, Nancy Ruttenburg, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
The Center's Working Group on the Novel provides an opportunity for students and faculty in different departments whose work is oriented toward the history and theory of the novel to develop a sustained conversation that highlights this dimension of their work. One of the goals of the group is to address the re-scaling of novel studies, toward both less canonical European and American texts and novels outside of American and European contexts. Workshop meetings typically include discussion of both a work-in-progress and the novel, or section of a novel, that is at the center of this work. Courses at the Center is a pedagogy initiative intended to foster graduate student involvement and research. Last spring the Center initiated this program with Margaret Cohen's seminar on Genres of the Novel.
