Art as Action: Readings and Misreadings in the Letters of William and Henry James

by Mara Naselli Around 1860, shortly after the James family returned from Europe to Newport for William’s painting apprenticeship, Edward Waldo Emerson (Ralph Waldo’s son), came for a visit. He experienced firsthand the vigor of a Jamesian family debate over dinner, hands gesticulating and brandishing dinner knives: “Don’t be disturbed, Edward,” Emerson recalls Mrs. James…

On Not Getting the Joke: William Faulkner’s Wild Horses

by Mara Naselli In an introduction to a seminal collection of Faulkner’s work, published in 1946, Malcolm Cowley called William Faulkner’s story “Spotted Horses” “wildly funny”—“the culminating example of American backwoods humor.” The collection resurrected Faulkner’s career and made his work teachable, part of the American canon. Nearly forty years later Cowley called it the…

We Be Monsters: Montaigne and the Age of Discovery

by Mara Naselli Montaigne's essays are famously voluminous. He didn't cut text; he added it. The book is a monster. He said so himself: “What are these Essays if not monstrosities and grotesques, botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order, sequence, and proportion which are purely fortuitous.” Despite…