English 190

Book List

Baldwin, James: Giovanni's Room; Baldwin, James: Go Tell It on the Mountain; Baldwin , James: Another Country; James, Henry: The Ambassadors; James, Henry: The Beast in the Jungle; James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady

Description

James Baldwin made little secret of the importance of Henry James to his creative life, paying debt in complex, archly poetic sentences that drew snide dismissals from friends and rivals alike (Mailer: “even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume”). Baldwin and James certainly shared a great deal in life and art, having chosen European exile and then turned that exile into a major theme within their art.  Our contemporary bias for self-disclosure might predispose us to the view that Baldwin felt he found a fellow queer writer in James; however, James’s reticence on such matters means that “queer” (if it should signify anything) names the moment when the relationship gets awkward. This class will thus explore aesthetic and political concerns these writers shared as well as queer “sensibilities” that, always deniable if not always denied, may or may not be there—the many effects, both dramatic and formal, that keep us at a loss for knowledge of our subject, i.e., reticence, renunciation, opacity, bewilderment, and belated recognition.

We will read three novels by each author.  By James: The Portrait of a Lady, The Beast in the Jungle, The Ambassadors. By Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, Another Country.  Both writers also produced a vast number of essays and short stories; we will read selections from their wider oeuvre.