The Novel and the Concept of Culture – MA Seminar

“Culture,” wrote the British intellectual Raymond Williams, “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the different meanings that this keyword has accrued in the course of the last two hundred years. We will place special emphasis on the historical role that the novel had played in giving shape and substance to the modern idea that human beings are cultural creatures all the way down: that is, that we are products of the particular time and place in which we happen to have been born (rather than, say, embodied souls or rational agents). Our archive will include travelogues, ethnographic reports, theoretical materials, novels and short stories.