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Henry James and Edward Said: Problems of Value in a Secular World

Framed by the problematic of postcolonial studies, this talk explores consonances between the perspectives of Henry James and a major postcolonial critic, Edward W. Said. Taking the novel as a form "worldly" in Said's sense, and guided by emphases important to Said in the work of Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, the talk explores Said's defense of literature, even when it arises from privilege. It brings this to the difficult case of The Golden Bowl, working especially with James's analysis of Adam Verver's self-recognition, in dialogue with Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer, as possessing "the spirit of the connoisseur."