Michael Gorra

Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English
Seelye 401, x3305, mgorra@smith.edu

I do novels---English and American both, Anglophone-Indian, the occasional Russian or French, 19th and 20th century, almost anything from Jane Austen to last week. My main concern is with the history and development of the form, which has a necessary but oblique relation to other kinds of history. My interest almost always starts, however, with a particular book or author rather than with a theoretical or methodological question. Over the years I've worked a lot, both in the classroom and on the page, with very recent fiction. But lately I've found myself pushed back in time, and drawn more steadily to such major figures as Conrad, Faulkner, and Henry James.

I came to Smith in 1985, after getting my A.B. at Amherst and my Ph.D. at Stanford. My current upper-division courses include The Victorian Novel, Modern British Fiction, The Novel Now, and a seminar on James; I also teach courses in the Comparative Literature Program on travel writing and the 19th century short story. Honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation, and a National Book Critics Circle award for my work as a reviewer. My books aside, much of my work has indeed come in the form of reviews, but I've also written about travel and food, and done introductions to novels by Graham Greene and R. K. Narayan. Right now I have two book projects underway. One is a Norton Critical Edition of Falkner's As I Lay Dying. The other is a critical narrative about James that I'm calling Portrait of a Novel.

Books

The English Novel at Mid-Century London: Macmillan, 1990.
American edition, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990.

After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

The Bells in Their Silence: Travels Through Germany. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2004.

The Portable Conrad, as editor. Penguin Classics, 2007.

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Links

“Joseph Conrad.” From The Hudson Review, Winter 2007. Slightly abridged version of Portable introduction.
www.hudsonreview.com/gorraWi07.pdf

“Fevers.” From TLS, 9 February 2007. Review of Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton.
www.tls.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,25336-2588653,00.html

First chapter of The Bells in Their Silence
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7718.html