Humanities Brown Bag Seminar

The capacity to represent, in detail, the thoughts of an individual character is arguably what distinguishes the novel as a literary form. Among our keenest motivations for reading novels is the promise of psychological intimacy with a character—of gaining access to someone else's mind. So what happens when the thoughts and feelings of a protagonist are continually obscured? This talk will explore the significance of the "impressionable" protagonist: a figure (often a child) who proliferates across 20th century literature, and whose mental processing of a novel's events typically happens out of view. Set against the so-called "omniscient" narration of the nineteenth-century novel, in which a protagonist's thoughts are more transparently accessed and read, I argue that the shifting, partial perspective we encounter in a novel of impressionability draws attention to the material presence of its protagonist's body. Representations of this figure, I propose, re-emphasize the body as a boundary that is breached when we represent what a character is thinking, in doing so raising fundamental questions about both the capabilities and ethics of the novel as a form.