Jonathan Culler, Ian Watt Lecture, “The Problem of the Narrator” (03/02/2026)

Jonathan Culler, Ian Watt Lecture, “The Problem of the Narrator” (03:02:2026)

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(0:00:00) (Typing sounds and music) Enver Ali Akova: Welcome and thanks for joining us for another installment of CSN Cafe, a podcast for the Center for the Study of the Novel. In this episode, our host, Héctor Hoyos, is joined by Jonathan Culler, who is the Class of 1916 Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University, and Anne Gross, PhD student in the Department of English at Stanford. Jonathan Culler visited the Center on March 2nd to deliver the annual Ian Watt Lecture, entitled “The Problem of the Narrator.” This episode was recorded directly before that lecture and we are delighted (0:01:00) to be sharing it with you now thank you for listening in on another one of our warm and informal conversations. Héctor Hoyos: Welcome to another episode of the Center for the Study of the Novel’s podcast. I am Héctor Hoyos, faculty director at the Center, for those who are joining the series just today. And I wouldn't be surprised if you are, as we have a very distinguished and eminent speaker with us today, Professor Jonathan Culler. He has bottled lightning not once, but several times, teaching generations of literary critics how to read with theory, how to think with poetry, and even more broadly, how to engage with form in an informed, precise manner. It is a pleasure to have you, Jonathan. Jonathan Culler: Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Héctor Hoyos: And, you know, we are delighted today to have a theme on how has the study of the novel changed, how is it looking for the future, which calls for longue durée for several generations of scholars convening (0:02:00) around the table. So I'm also very pleased to introduce Anne Gross. She's a first-year graduate student in the Department of English, she did her undergraduate at Yale University, and her interests include literary theory and the novel. She's working to theorize the newspaper as a literary form. Welcome, Anne. Anne Gross: Thank you for having me. Héctor Hoyos: Well, it's truly a pleasure. And I think we're going to jump right in with this convening theme: how has the study of the novel changed? How is it looking for the future? And very few people in the profession truly have the kind of - Wittgenstein had this phrase that comes and haunts me every now and then, Übersichtliche Darstellung, “when you can see oneself from above.” And that would be Jonathan Culler. So Jonathan, what does that question involve? Jonathan Culler: Well, it certainly evokes a longue durée since I've been at this for a long time. Though I should say that I've not really thought of myself as a specialist in the novel. Oddly enough, there is a division in the study of narrative and (0:03:00) novel forms. In fact, you have two separate scholarly organizations, the Society for Novel Studies, on the one hand and the International Society for the Study of Narrative on the other. I've been to the Society of Novel Studies conferences a couple of times, but I've been a regular at the International Society for the Study of Narrative. So I guess except for my first book, which was on Flaubert, a novelist, where I was deeply engaged with the question of novels and how to read them, I really thought of myself as engaged with narratology rather than novel studies as such. It may not make a lot of difference, but I'm happy to try to talk about developments in the general area of narratology, novel studies, etc. Héctor Hoyos: Yeah, I think that division maybe starts with Roland Barthes and work versus text. And I think you've been very much in the camp of the text, and so has the profession at large. CSN is a bit of an institutional (0:04:00) oddity in that our charter is to study the novel as we formed and were founded since 2000. But I do want to follow up with that friction between ideas and institutions, because, I mean, it seems only natural to me that if you like to read novels, you might also like to read poetry. And that's a-okay, but your professional life can be entirely divided if you have those two interests. What do you make after, as you have pointed out, being in the profession for a while, of the ways that institutions shape our ways of thought in manners that are less than optimal for the reality of literature? Jonathan Culler: Well, I certainly think I've long disregarded the academy's inclination, or at least literary studies' inclination to divide things according to historical periods. I started out, I guess, as a Renaissance specialist as an undergraduate. I did history and literature of early modern Europe and continued to do that a bit, (0:05:00) and then moved into the modern period also as a graduate student. But then I branched out basically into literary theory, and ever since I've been rather a dilettante, moving back and forth between poetry and narrative. At Cornell, where I taught for 45 years, I would teach graduate courses on literary theory, but sometimes on theory of the lyric, and sometimes on narratology or narrative theory. And certainly my own work - I've been very unfaithful to narratology through the years. I started out in the structuralist moment in the 1960s, much invested in narratology and the study of narrative, just because that was what people like Barthes and Gérard Genette and Todorov were working on. And I then became more interested in other branches of theory, like deconstruction, (0:06:00) which was not particularly invested in narrative studies. And then there was a period in the 20th century when I was really working on a big book on the lyric called Theory of the Lyric, and during that time I taught more poetry and much less fiction or narrative studies. But now, since that book was published in 2015, I've in some ways migrated back. I continue to work on the lyric, but I migrated back towards narratology in recent years. But that's true. I certainly don't feel that I have a real specialty, except insofar as one can say, literary theory in general is a specialty, which would include both poetry and narrative. Anne Gross: Do you think that that kind of interdisciplinarity is a privilege of having tenure and being able to do what you want? Or do you think that that kind of movement between different genres or literary forms is actually where the field is going? (0:07:00) Jonathan Culler: I feel very bad at prediction. I remember a long time ago, I guess it would have been back in the early 1970s, I firmly predicted that the historical periods are going to disappear - we're not going to keep organizing literature in this way that makes no sense, where you have to work on the 18th century or you become a 19th century specialist. And that proved wrong. It's still that departments are divided up that way. And I think in part, just because of the scarcity of jobs, if you advertised a position in literature, you’d get thousands of applications. Or even if you said study of the novel, we would probably get too many applications. So the temptation to advertise a job in 19th century fiction may be strong. You at least get only a thousand applicants or something of that sort. But I would hope that this wouldn’t be - that people or departments, especially as numbers of students interested in majoring in English (0:08:00) decline, it's certainly to the advantage for departments to be able to hire people who can do several different things and who aren't committed to “I have to teach the Victorian novel every year.” I should be able to teach different genres, different periods. And it's more interesting to do that, actually, not to teach the same course every year, but to vary the things that you're teaching. Héctor Hoyos: How do we distinguish - this is an honest question, not a rhetorical question - how do we distinguish good dilettantism from bad dilettantism? I have the feeling that dilettantism is essential for literature. You know, it breeds curiosity. But how can we tell? Jonathan Culler: How can we tell? Well, yes. It's hard to tell, obviously, but it's hard to tell also, in general, how you distinguish good work in a period from bad work in a period, except to say you have to read it, and does it seem to you to illuminate things in ways that they haven't been illuminated before? (0:09:00) Or give you new ideas, suggest new ideas, etc? So I think it would be the same with good dilettantism and bad dilettantism. I firmly believe that my dilettantism has been good dilettantism. You know, in that if people - if I were to try to write about both narrative and poetry, and presses or editors were to reject my work in both domains, I would think I would have come to feel, “okay, I have to become more specialized since clearly this is not working.” But so far, I've been successful in placing and in the reception of work that has moved around quite a lot. Héctor Hoyos: I'm going to pivot and, Anne, actually ask a question to you. Because you came into the conversation with (and as I noted in my introduction of you, you are in your first year of the PhD program), but you came with an awareness of the academic market. How did that start for you and what do you make of it from your vantage point? (0:10:00) Anne Gross: The academic market's pressure on the kinds of things that are able to be studied? Is that what you're meaning? Héctor Hoyos: Exactly. Anne Gross: Yeah. I mean, I think that that's something that we are asked to be aware of from the very get-go. And it's something that I've been reflecting about recently with my choice of object, where I'm studying newspapers largely because I feel that this is something that I can say something new on, whereas maybe my passions would lie, in a vacuum - I don't know. I don't know, because I feel pretty passionate about the newspaper unto itself, but maybe in a vacuum, if I didn't have to worry about being competitive on a job market, my interests would move in more traced directions. But I think that this is, I mean, it's connected to the question that I was really interested in posing to you of the problem of new interpretations, where I feel that we, as undergrads and then as grad students, are trained to say something new and (0:11:00) push ourselves towards being able to kind of carve out a space on the market. And the quality of a good idea comes from that frame. So the question that I was really excited to pose to you was in encountering in your work a couple of times what I take to be a kind of provocative and countercultural mode of the - I have actually some quotes, if you don't mind. Jonathan Culler: I’ll recognize the quotes. I understand. Anne Gross: In your 2018 book talk on the Theory of the Lyric, you write that one of your goals is to combat what you take to be kind of an unnecessary presumption of much literary lyric theory and pedagogy, “that the goal of literary study is to give rise to new interpretations.” So I'm curious how you think about new interpretations. Do you think that this is a dead end for literary studies? What is the alternate model that you propose? Jonathan Culler: I guess I do think it's something of a dead end, the idea that the goal is to discover that this work, which people have been reading and enjoying for (0:12:00) decades, for centuries, perhaps, really means something different deep down. That's sort of the question. So for me, I'm committed to an opposition between poetics and hermeneutics. Hermeneutics, you start with a text and you try to discover what it means. It comes from biblical hermeneutics originally. And of course, if you're a believer in the Bible, it's important, very important to know what these biblical texts truly mean because they're going to guide your life, shall we say. Whereas poetics works in the opposite direction. It starts with texts and the kinds of meanings and effects they have for readers and tries to understand how it is that this is possible. It’s certainly in the structuralist terminology, what we say is that linguistics serves as a model for what we are doing in poetics. Poetics stands to literature as linguistics stands to language. The goal of linguistics is not to tell you that you've been (0:13:00) wrong all along in thinking that “the cat sat on the mat” means one thing, that it actually means something different, newer, and richer, but to try to understand how it is that these noises can have the meanings they do for readers. So poetics starts with works and their effects, shall we say, and tries to understand what are the conventions, what are sometimes conventions of interpretation, what are sometimes conventions of genres, etc., that enable them to have the kinds of effects that they do. I, for a long time at Cornell, I taught a course called Major Poets and the course description said that the premise of this course is that students often say they don't like poetry. And I think that's partly because they've, in school, perhaps have often felt that they are being asked to sort of guess what the teacher has in mind when they say “What does this symbolize?” or (0:14:00) “What is this poem really about,” as we say? And so the course was based on the proposition that there are many things to do with poems other than interpret them. You can imitate them, for example. It used to be a staple of literary education in the old days, people would do imitations. Of course, when literary education was mostly focused on Latin, they would do translations, similar to imitation, shall we say, or different kinds of exercises, scansions, or identification of rhetorical figures, all of which are part of the enterprise of poetics, not trying to produce or discover a new meaning for the works, but to understand how they function. So, yes, certainly in my lyric book, for example, I don't think that I'm - I certainly wasn't trying to produce new interpretations of poems that I cited. I was trying to account for what's going on in the poems, how they relate to the conventions of (0:15:00) the genre, and certainly I wasn't neglecting meaning, but I was sort of taking meaning for granted as something to be explained. Anne Gross: Does that, if you don't mind me following up, does that then relocate novelty onto another level? I mean, is it still the same kind of marketable novelty of finding a new explanation of the same thing? Jonathan Culler: Yeah, I think so. Certainly one's interested in novelty and you’re trying to understand something that you haven't understood before, but it's a different thing. It's not that I haven't understood the work. In fact, with a lot of poetry, understanding it may be overrated. You get pleasure from poetry just as we get pleasure from songs without necessarily understanding them. I'm sure you have songs that run through your head that you have no idea what they're about. I mean, in my day, it was all, you would just assume if you don't understand it, it must be about drugs, but it may be the same today. But anyway, yes, so (0:16:00) there's still attempting something to do something novel. It's just displaced. Héctor Hoyos: It would appear that newness is the currency of the market. Jonathan Culler: Yeah, I think so, yeah. Héctor Hoyos: Interestingly, in our podcast, one thing we found, to my surprise, is that institutions on the market just keep creeping into conversations about novels. Are there novels that come to mind that might present some kind of antidote to this, that can question the productivity of the ways that we read? Any unproductive books that come to mind? Jonathan Culler: Unproductive books, hm. I mean, my Flaubert book (Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty) was based on the presumption that I, as a “Young Turk,” felt that Flaubert's novels demonstrated the unproductiveness of many of the ways (0:17:00) that critics had read them by attempting elaborate symbolic interpretations or attempting to show that any detail must be related to a character who is nearby somehow, that it’s all gotta be explained by focalization or something of that sort. So I certainly thought I was demonstrating that there were lots of unproductive ways of reading Flaubert. I'm sure there are unproductive novels, I think, that I probably wouldn't have finished! I once read all the way through Infinite Jest because I had a very smart student who wanted to do an honors thesis on it, and I had to require myself to read 100 pages a day in order to get through the damn thing. And unfortunately, his attraction to it turned out to have been partly fueled by drugs, and he flipped out and didn't do the honors thesis in the end, but I wish I had been able to stop before I got to the end of Infinite Jest. I did sort of cheat by concentrating on the tennis plot and (0:18:00) avoiding the drug plots to some extent. But yeah, I think there are lots of unproductive novels. But I'm happy to — I didn't want to say I wouldn't talk about changes in the study of the novel, I'm happy to do that. I think there are changes. And I asked you earlier whether, obviously, Franco Moretti, the co-founder of the Literary Lab here, and the Center for the Study of the Novel, had a new program for the study of novels. Sometimes he called it distant reading, sometimes he called it literary geography, but it was an antidote to the focus on close reading that most English professors tend to at least celebrate, even if they're doing other things in their work. And it sort of involved a great expansion of the corpus to consider not just the famous novels, (0:19:00) by well-known writers, but all the novels being published in particular periods, which produced really quite interesting results of seeing how it led to new thinking of novels in the context of the history of genres and how genres might spread across Europe through translation, through other kinds of influences. It was really a very fetching sort of historical but also quantitative approach to the production of novelistic fiction. I don't know how much that's now sort of merged with digital humanities and large language models, I guess, and you can run all sorts of experiments. But in his hands, he was a pioneer in that domain - I haven't tried to follow what's happening in that domain, and I don't know how much influence it had. But certainly, if you think about changes in the striking moments in the history of novel studies, at least in my time, there's that. The other (0:20:00) big development would be the rise of feminist criticism, feminist narratology, but not just feminist narratology. So people like Susan Lanser, the work of people like Susan Lanser, for example, would focus on women writers, but also on gender in novels in general, and how the lens of gender changes your approach to novels. It often led to a resistance to plot-oriented approaches to fiction. Plot was seen as part of a masculine ethics, where it's the action hero who meets challenges and has to defeat them. There are many other possibilities for the core of novels, including, well, what Monika Fludernik went on to call simply “experiencing” as opposed to plot, that many (0:21:00) novels by women are said often to involve not so much dramatic plots, but experiences which may become complicated, complicating. So that I think is - and also just a general different take on the models of desire, it was Susan Winnett who wrote about the the importance of rejecting the Oedipal model of desire, where the man is out there killing the father and has to challenge authority in order to make his way in the world and try to allow for the possibility of other models of desire. That would be one - that would be two, at least, new developments in the - well, my vantage is sort of from late 60s till the present, but that’s those two developments. There also was a major cognitivist turn in studies of narrative, anyway, I don't know how far that extended to just novel studies, (0:22:00) but David Herman was one of the leaders of that movement, but Monika Fludernik took up some strains from the Cognitivist turn. This involved basically reshifting your focus and not thinking about specifically literary genres, but thinking about mental operations in general, and claiming that what happens when we're thinking about novels is not different from what happens when we think about other ways of shaping experience through non-literary shapings. And so we need to think about the frames and the schemes, the scripts - the scripts. It involved partly introducing a somewhat new vocabulary for familiar things, the cognitivist turn. Again, I haven't tried to follow that closely. I'm not sure how Monika Fludernik, again, picked up some of those trends in talking about experiencing, for example, rather than plot. (0:23:00) And I guess Monika Fludernik also picked up what was important, at a certain moment, with people go beyond - we'd always been talking about, I mean, structuralist narratology always talked about narrative, but really it was focused for the most part on literary narratives, even though Roland Barthes started off with James Bond as his example in his earliest work on the structure of narrative - but the work of anthropologist William Labov was quite important at a certain point. Labov studied narratives from everyday life, the stories people tell one another, especially danger of death stories. You would ask people in the inner city, “were you ever in danger of death, of being killed?” And if somebody said yes, he would say, “well, tell me what happened,” and then they would narrate and he would record and analyze the structure of these stories, and he came to focus on the tell-ability (0:24:00) of stories. What is it that makes a story tellable? What makes it worth it? It's a different kind of orientation, but it's certainly relevant to novels. If you're reading a novel, you want it to be worth it in the end. It has to be a story that is, for some reason, tellable. I think that that's had a certain amount of influence in the domain of novel studies, not wanting to close off our attention and restrict it simply to novels, but think about the kinds of structures at work in stories from everyday life, even though a lot of them are much less interesting than novels, should we say, not “complex.” Monica Fludernik, in one of the most important works of narratology, but also of novel studies: Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology, (0:25:00) in which she is sort of building on the expansion of the narrative canon especially. Instead of working simply on 19th century novels or 19th and early 20th century novels, she went back to work on medieval saints' lives, etc., and also on postmodern fiction, postmodern narrative. And her framework, instead of making postmodern narrative anomalous, it - with some of her reorientation, especially reorientation away from a story discourse model that may plot the foundation for novels - it made it possible to think about these postmodern or innovative radical fictions as more normal than others. And so, as a result, it became natural for her students, especially Jan Albers, to invent (0:26:00) unnatural narratology as a following on from her natural narratology, which looks at all the ways in which novels do not respect real-world models of action and personhood and things of that sort. So Jan Albers, Brian Richardson are sort of two of the people there. I think of them primarily as in the domain of narratology, but of course they do write about actual novels when they're doing their narratological work. Héctor Hoyos: Wow. Jonathan Culler: So I can stop there for the moment. Héctor Hoyos: That is an amazing genealogy, and thank you very much for mapping this out. I was also thinking of your Cornell colleague, Caroline Levine, who brings forms out in the world, and that has consequences. Jonathan Culler: Yes, that works. She's been more on the novel side of things, yes, in her work. Though now she's working on, her recent work has been about politics and climate change. Anyway. (0:27:00) Héctor Hoyos: In the spirit of porosity and thinking of those continuities, we've spoken not just about novels, but about lyric, poetics, theory - I'd love to pick your brain, Jonathan, about what does someone with your experience with language make of my themes that we live with today in the political arena? It's quite fascinating, the stuff that has been happening to signifiers as of late. For two decades, say, the adjective illegal has been latched onto people, which is a really odd thing to do to that poor little adjective, let alone the people! So that's just one example of a real barrage of disassociations between signifiers and signified, weaponization of the weaponization of language, second, third order phenomena. Any hot takes on that? Jonathan Culler: I don't have any hot takes on that. (0:28:00) It's certainly the politicization of so many things. Of course, it didn't start with Trump. It started, of course, we had slogans back in the 60s, “the personal is the political.” So it was already… And certainly with the heritage of Marxist criticism, there was always, in novel studies, of course, the desire to unearth the political dimensions of whatever kinds of representation were taking place in novels, including in feminist studies, which saw the political dimensions of certain narrative conventions or certain assumptions about the structures of novels. So the politicalization is something that's been going on for a long time. It's become especially vicious in recent years, and I'm afraid I really don't have anything original to say about that. It's a (0:29:00) horrible situation that we are living in, and it's very difficult to know how to combat it. Anne Gross: I’m wondering if you think that (because I was just noting down the different opening methods that you were talking about with studying the novel; you were mentioning the digital humanities, the feminist expansion, the cognitivist approach, and then also mentioning stories from everyday life) and I'm wondering whether you think that there's something particular about the novel, and this would be a question for both of you, but whether there's something particular about the novel in its relationship to the world that allows this kind of meaningful political reflection? Is this an external shift that's being imposed upon a form, or is it that actually the novel uniquely has the ability to help us think through political shifts of the kind that you were just asking about as well? Jonathan Culler: I don't know that it uniquely has that power. I imagine that films, cinema and television (0:30:00) can often reach people much in a more immediate way than a novel, and they may have effects. But at least the novel, I mean, certainly one of the striking features of novels is that they both can describe anything that happens in everyday life, but also things that don't happen in everyday life. They can have all kinds of different perspectives, whether you have narrators who understand, who can report on the inmost thoughts and feelings of characters which were ordinarily inaccessible to us and things of that sort, or which can undertake shifts in time that we find hard to undertake in thinking about ordinary life. So, certainly, traditionally, of course, novels have been thought dangerous because of the ways in which they incited desires of people to - whether it's Emma Bovary's desire to be carried off by a knight in shining armor or to (0:31:00) either to die or to live in Paris, hat's her alternatives to the stultifying life that she was leading in a provincial village, provincial town. So the novels can incite all kinds of desires and, of course, can make vivid scenes of oppression. That's another powerful effect that people claimed. I can't evaluate the claims made for Uncle Tom's Cabin as an important incitement to resistance to slavery in the Civil War, but that's certainly a claim that was made about that. And there are certainly other novels that can behave in similar ways, making vivid those conditions of oppressive conditions. So, yes, I think, of course, films could do the same many of the same things that novels can do, so I don't want to make claims for the uniqueness of novels. Poetry (0:32:00) tends to work in less representational ways. If it challenges things, it does so with unusual combinations of signifiers that produce results you hadn't thought about, and also making language more memorable by rhythms and euphonious combination for the rhyme, rhythms, sound patterning, etc. So different kinds of innovation generally. So I do think that literature is something we shouldn't abandon, that it has, that it can be a source of hope as well as of despair. Anne Gross: [laughing] That’s good to know! Héctor Hoyos: I'll add a rejoinder to that: I do think there's something specific about the novel form in the sense that it's a relic from a different attention economy. Film, you can consume even the most thoughtful Jean-Luc Caudard film these days can be reduced to Instagram feeds or TikTok. (0:33:00) The novel resists, if you stick with it, it can rewire you - I’m mixing metaphors there. Jonathan Culler: Yes, I see. Yeah, certainly it's harder. I was saying just yesterday that at Cornell, we, in comparative literature, we used to have a course called “Great Books,” which was quite popular, but it involved long books. You know, you'd read The Odyssey, or you'd read at least the Inferno, Dante's Inferno. You'd read long books, quite long books, and as it became increasingly unpopular, they eventually changed it to “Great Short Works” - Anne Gross: What! Jonathan Culler: Which actually, I mean, so often literature courses have, in English, work with the novella, anyway, you read Thomas Mann, you read Kafka - Anne Gross: That’s amazing. Jonathan Culler: You read short things just because it takes too much time to read long works. Introduction to Literary Studies courses (0:34:00) tend to use shorter works anyway. There are plenty of great ones around, so you can, you know, you can read Gogol, you can read Thomas Mann, you can read Kafka, you can read all sorts of things. You can read The Dead, you know, etc., etc. But we couldn't seem to attract enough students for the great books anymore. Anne Gross: I'm wondering, I guess I'm curious whether - because in what you just mentioned, the idea that novels have their unique capacity to produce, I don't want to say, maybe I will say utopic visions, you are locating that in the difference between the attentional economy of which it was a product and then where it's happening now. So it's the difference between, it’s the non-representational quality of the novel as it exists today that makes it efficacious politically. And you are saying something similar also where their capacity to incite desire or represent things, make vivid scenes of suffering that wouldn't naturally be (0:35:00) vivid to us or give us access to the internal of characters that we wouldn't normally be able to have. So is it for you guys, is it the non-representational part of the novel that gives it its efficacy, or is it somehow the connection between that difference and similarity with real life that allows it to do what it does? Jonathan Culler: I wouldn't have said it was a non-representational, because some of us certainly, if we're talking about representing scenes of oppression, for example, that's certainly representational. And of course, even the incitement of desire is often, it takes the form of representation of, you know, the idyllic life in urban environments or some of the excitement of life in urban environments as opposed to your provincial backwater. So, yeah, but it is, yeah, I wouldn't say it's not necessarily non-representational, but I think that with poetry, I was saying, suggesting the importance of the non-representational there. (00:36:00) Héctor Hoyos: I'm still mulling over “making the stone stony.” You know, that's what keeps me awake at night. We want to slide in one final question. Since you had written against studying literature by period, and we laughed about this, but what about geography? What do you make of that? I'm thinking, you know, when the Flaubert book came out, you have, you know, a core of readers who are familiar with French culture in various states, by the time that Literary Theory, A Very Short Introduction comes out, the canon has expanded geographically, you know, tenfold, twentyfold. And by the time the Theory of the Lyric comes out, right, the geography of it all is a little suspect. It's a little suspect also in Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova's diffusionist theories of world literature. So I would love to hear how you feel that geography plays a part in the study of literature and the novel. (0:37:00) Jonathan Culler: Yeah, well, certainly. Yeah, I mean, we are partly we are limited by our linguistic linguistic knowledge, our linguistic capacity insofar as we are interested in the original texts in original languages, we can't master as many languages as we would like and generally haven't tried. But yeah, so certainly, I mean, in comparative literature, this has been a major issue, of course, as you know, through the years that we started out, it was a very deliberately Eurocentric discipline, and that seemed to be a source of strength. People prided themselves on reading several European languages and being able to do comparisons, etc. But the challenge to that European hegemony was already starting in the 1970s. I was a visiting professor at Yale (0:38:00) for a semester in 1975, and David Damrosch was a freshman in comparative literature that year, and he refused to, he was determined that he wanted to write his paper on, I think it was some Peruvian something that I knew nothing about. And I said, okay, go ahead and do that. And he was already, as a freshman, determined to study the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Peruvian something or other. He was starting his world literature campaign in the first year of graduate school against resistance of people like me who were definitely confined to Europe. And I certainly see the justice of that, that there's a whole world of literature out there. It's the problem of dilettantism that you raised earlier, of course, raises its head very powerfully there. If you pick a little, you know, I know this from about ancient Egypt, I know this Chinese novel. We cherry-pick the works that people tell us are the great works (0:39:00) from different eras. That is enriching, but as you say, it doesn't give you the kind of depth of knowledge or contextual understanding of literary forms that we are used to taking for granted in our study of the languages and literatures that we know better. So it is a problem. And I have, of course, in Theory of the Lyric, I do say it's the Western tradition. I don't talk, I guess, at all about Russian literature, because that's a language I don't know, and I have never really engaged with Russian poetry, and the Spanish makes a very small appearance. I asked a colleague,” what are the most famous Spanish poems in Spanish?” And I got a little list, and so I started reading them, and some of them are extremely good. And because of my knowledge of Italian, I'm able to sort of haplessly pick my way through Spanish lyrics, especially. But the limitations of that book are… (0:40:00) I try to acknowledge them. It would be obviously better to be able to think about Chinese poetry and Japanese poetry and Persian poetry, et cetera, probably especially. But no, it's a real problem. It has to do with human limitations. And certainly, David Damroche is someone who has managed to work hard to put together anthologies, study programs. He has international summer sessions that he organizes in Europe, in China and in Cambridge, to help to prepare people, teach people, get people to acquaint themselves with a broad range of literature from different continents. And that's quite admirable, I think. Héctor Hoyos: Fantastic. We are running out of time, but I'd like to gesture to the future of the study of the novel by asking Anne, (0:41:00) as our first year English grad student, Jonathan Culler: Yes, that’s good! The future is hers! The future is hers! where would you like to take things in the study of the novel? Or what questions does this conversation leave with you, if I may? Anne Gross: Thank you. Thank you for that question. Well, I think that I feel a lot of joy and optimism about what we're doing today. I think perhaps that emerges as a kind of combat against the onslaught of negativity around. But I think that it feels more and more like an urgent privilege and a true important activity to be able to study literature, which is just, to me, the highest form of what the human mind can create. And the way that it encourages us to open ourselves to become who we thought we wanted to be but didn't quite know that we could become through the process of reading. And I'm teaching for the first time this quarter, (0:42:00) and I love it. The students are amazing. They're so curious. Being students at Stanford studying literature, they've been faced with a microcosm of what we're faced with at a broader scale where they're constantly asked to justify why they're doing what they're doing and it's assumed that they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. And they just show up in the classroom filled with energy, with so many questions, such deep engagement with the texts. It's a privilege to get to teach, and it's a privilege to get to continue forward the legacy of what you've started to create with narrative studies and with the Center for the Study of the Novel. I feel filled with joy and optimism with it. Héctor Hoyos: Let us end there! Jonathan Culler: No better note on which to end. Absolutely. Héctor Hoyos: Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much.