Course Syllabus

If you are interested in taking this seminar, please 1) submit a petition on my.harvard and 2) email me (jbolton@fas.harvard.edu) this brief questionnaire as soon as possible. Course registration closes today!

Reading the Novella

Prof. Jonathan Bolton
Wednesdays 3-5 p.m.
Fall 2026

Short enough to read in a single sitting, but more complex and absorbing than short stories, novellas give us some of our most intense reading experiences. In this discussion seminar, we will read some of the enduring classics of the novella from around the world, including works by Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Herman Melville, Bohumil Hrabal, Katherine Anne Porter, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, Eileen Chang, and others; we will also consider how the novella’s compression and acceleration of plot make it ideal for horror, suspense, and other forms of "genre” fiction. We will pay close attention to form, suspense, plotting, and the way that different narrative modes allow authors to pose philosophical and political questions.

Reading a novella in one sitting offers a vastly different (and better) aesthetic experience from reading it in five or six different sessions in as many different places. To paraphrase John Gardner, novellas are generally built around a single flow of action, focused on a single character, building through a series of increasingly dramatic moments toward a final resolution. When you are reading them, it makes sense to preserve this unity of impression. Therefore, one of the goals of this seminar will be to help you read in an attentive, focused manner, without distractions, so that you can give each text the greatest opportunity to "work" on your mind and aesthetic sensibilities. To that end, I will ask you to pay close attention to the conditions of reading, to set aside focused and secluded time each week, and to read each novella as far as possible in a single sitting, 

This seminar will be run as a discussion, with our main activity being close reading together in class. Assignments will include attendance and active participation at all class sessions, a weekly journal, several structured two-page essays, a "problem set" on some of the narrative techniques we will be studying, and a final essay or project.

TENTATIVE LIST OF READINGS

Here are some of the novellas we may read — this is a provisional list and may change. There will be about 100-150 pages of reading a week: always one novella as our main text for discussion, and often one or two additional short readings (perhaps a critical essay, or a short story by the same author or in the same genre). For one or two weeks, there will be a second novella to read.

Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855)
Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1865)
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)
Anton Chekhov, The Duel (1891)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
James Joyce, “The Dead” (1914)
Junichiro Tanizaki, “Portrait of Shunkin” (1933)
Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (1939)
Eileen Chang, “Love in a Fallen City” (1943)
Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains (1965)
Natalia Ginzburg, Family (1977)
Rachel Ingalls, Mrs. Caliban (1983)
Aleksandar Hemon, "Blind Joseph Pronek and Dead Souls" (2000)
Claire Keegan, Foster (2010)