Humanities at Stanford

Back to News Center

Stanford and Berkeley Humanities Centers Co-host Literary Festival Event

Novels have captured readers’ imaginations for hundreds of years. What is it about this literary form that keeps people coming back for more?

On Monday October 10th, 2011, professors from Stanford University and UC Berkeley shared their thoughts about the world's most popular literary form with an audience at Litquake, San Francisco's largest literary festival. In a dialogue with attendees, the panelists delved into the evolution of the novel and uncovered novelistic gems overlooked by the reading public.

Co-presented by the Stanford Humanities Center and UC Berkeley’s Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, "The Best Novels You Haven’t Read" was held at the The Book Club of California in San Francisco.

Litquake is an annual week-long festival, held each October in various venues throughout San Francisco. It is the largest literary festival on the West Coast, bringing more than 300 authors together with fans of the written word for readings, performances, cross-media events, and panel discussions.

Literary Scholars Offer Different Viewpoints

The panelists, four English professors, two from UC Berkeley, and two from Stanford, each approached the discussion through the lens of their unique area of expertise. They presenters and some of the novels they each mentioned during the discussion:

English professor Nancy Ruttenburg, current director of Stanford's Center for the Study of the Novel, is writing a book about the history and meanings of conscience in life and in literature.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Marcel Proust, Remembrances of Things Past
Kenzaburo Oe, The Changeling
J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed
Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
Elizabeth Stoddard, The Morgesons
Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

Kent Puckett, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, is author of Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford, 2008) and a 2011 winner of Berkeley's Distinguished Teaching Award.  

Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus
Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book
Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Ramón Saldívar is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University whose research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century comparative literary studies, theory of the novel, and transnational American studies.

Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

Fiction writer Namwali Serpell is Assistant Professor of English at UC Berkeley whose research surrounds issues of ethics and literature, aesthetics, and theories of reading. Serpell will receive a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.

Jorge Luis Borges, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler...
H.P. Lovecraft, A History of the Necronomicon
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity
John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins (Vol. I) and William Empson: Against the Christians (Vol. II).
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (the collection that includes "Seven Types of Ambiguity")
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (in the Q&A)
J. Hillis Miller, On Literature (in the Q&A)

Continuing a Tradition

The Stanford Humanities Outreach Project and the Stanford Humanities Center have jointly sponsored Litquake events for the past three years. In last year's event, Representations of Race and Ethnicity in Art & Literature, four Stanford humanities professors discussed how portrayals of race and ethnicity in literature and art impact contemporary culture.

A panel of Stanford professors shared their thoughts on The Value of the Essay in the 21st Century in 2009, and scholars discussed the intersection of humanities scholarship and environmental issues in 2008.