About Us
Throughout its history, the Center for the Study of the Novel has promoted conversation on the practice and interpretation of the novel form across history and cultures. The CSN is committed to studying literature as a primary form of human expression and as an object of interdisciplinary analysis. These combined perspectives demonstrate just how much literature, and the novel in particular, may tell us. The CSN is therefore also committed to studying the practice of literary criticism and theory, and its history of illuminating the novel in relation to society and culture.
Under its current director, Margaret Cohen, programming at the Center extends the scope of novel studies to include the many forms that narrative aesthetics have taken across cultural contexts. Narrative traditions which precede or parallel the global rise of the novel; narrative forms which cross distinctions of media and prestige; and the methods and cultural histories which attend their valuation, all fall within the circle of the Center’s concern.
Programs
CSN offers a series of events each year, bringing speakers from across the US and beyond to address audiences drawn from Stanford and from across the Bay Area. These events include our annual 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 in 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 Literatures, 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 Wai Chee Dimock, Sianne Ngai, Mario Vargas Llosa, Fredric Jameson, Nancy Ruttenburg, Benedict Anderson, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Zadie Smith, J.M. Coetzee, Michael McKeon, Nicholas Dames, and Amanda Anderson.
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 through the academic year. One of the goals of the group is to address the shift in novel studies, both toward less canonical European and American texts and toward novels outside of Western contexts. Workshop meetings typically include discussion of both a work-in-progress and the novel, or section of a novel, on which this work is based. Interlocutors from other universities are also welcome.
Center for the
Study of the Novel
Margaret Jacks Hall, 460-411
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2087
Director
Graduate Coordinators
Caroline Bailey
Jessica Monaco
Vesta Pitts
Programs
Department of English
Division of Literatures,
Cultures, and Languages
Stanford Literary Lab