I ended up teaching a course on long books this semester. Here is the original proposal:

Why are long books long? Beyond its length, what makes a long book different from a short book? How is the experience of reading a long book distinct from that of reading a short book? Should long books be shorter? Should short books be longer? What, if any, characteristics do long books share? Is there a politics of extension? This course sets out to answer these apparently simple questions. Along the way, we will also consider the phenomenology of reading, and ask how we read and why?

We will begin by reading a couple of long books (and, for the sake of comparison, also a couple of short books by the same authors) together. After that, students will choose a long book of their own for further study and investigation.

But I was quite tentative and unsure about this proposal, and in fact came up with (and suggested to the department) two other possibilities, one on “Twenty-First-Century Women Writers” across various Romance languages, and the other on “Displacement and Mobility in Latin American Narrative.” I am putting the descriptions of those potential courses below. I suspect that at first sight they would have been more attractive to many students. Indeed, one of my worries about a course with the title “long books” was that nobody would want to take it, not least because it advertises from the start that it would involve a lot of reading…

To my surprise, in fact, more students signed up than I had anticipated. Specifically (in that this was always to be a combined graduate/undergraduate course), more undergraduates enrolled than I expected to do so. And these were undergraduate students, moreover, who were overwhelmingly engaged and outspoken from the start. I had worried that they would feel intimidated and silenced by the graduate students (as sometimes happens with these crosslisted courses), but on the contrary: if anything the undergraduates were more invested and wanted to make the most of the course and what it had to offer.

(Sidenote: This is something I noticed also in the other course I taught this semester, which I also worried about at first. I thought, especially after coming back from a year and a half without teaching–because of sabbatical and leave–AI would basically have taken over. But no: I think we have a rising generation of post-Covid and AI-resistant students who no longer want to be fobbed off by a sub-standard university.)

Anyhow, these other potential courses would no doubt have been interesting and productive in their way, I like to think. But I am very glad that I went with “Long Books,” a course I had in fact long been talking about and hoping to teach, even if at the last minute I almost got cold feet about it.

For one thing, it soon become clear that the initial question–“why are long books long?”–although it may seem trivial and even jokey at the outset (after all, the obvious answer is the banal one, “because they have more words”), is in fact a real question that opens up a whole series of topics and themes. Indeed, we have ended up discussing literature and politics, psychology, economics, aesthetics, sociology, even biology… and fundamental questions about the limits and possibilities of representation.

For another, the course proved challenging but also rewarding pedagogically: I asked students to read one long book that I chose (Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives), but also invited them to pick a long book of their own, which they read in tandem or parallel with the set book. “Teaching” these books that I had not read (that in some cases I had never even heard of before the start of the semester), I have never felt more like an ignorant schoolmaster. And yet now, in the last week of the semester, I have a (fleeting?) feeling that all these texts are starting to resonate with each other, as they come to their various endings.

And finally, I have a new respect for and interest in long books. Adapting Tolstoy, I do think it is true that while short books are short for mostly the same reasons, long books tend to be long in their own ways. Which is not to fetishize length for its own sake (there are plenty of bad long books), but to think about what can be done across a bigger canvas, and how long books postpone conclusions or resolutions for good reasons.

But these are the roads not taken…

1. Twenty-First-Century Women Writers

This course is a survey of contemporary women writers whose work has been translated from Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Catalan, or who are writing within a Romance Language tradition. Their books cover many different topics and styles: from history to memoir, autofiction to thriller, fantasy to horror; migration and violence, politics and family, race, class, and sexuality as well as gender, and much else. Amid all this variety, we will ask what if anything these texts might have in common. Does it make sense to talk of “women’s writing” here? Does the fact that they write or are fluent in a Romance language make this a meaningful category?

Though the set readings are still to be determined, these are some likely contenders…

Spanish: Mónica Ojeda (Ecuador), Jawbone (2018); Samanta Schweblin (Argentina), Little Eyes (2018)
French: Delphine de Vigan (France), Based on a True Story (2015); Annie Erneaux (France), The Years (2008)
Italian: Elena Ferrante (Italy), My Brilliant Friend (2012); Valeria Parrella (Italy), Almarina (2019)
Portuguese: Adriana Lisboa (Brazil), Crow Blue (2010); Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida (Angola/Portugal, That Hair (2015)
Romanian: Ioana Pârvulescu (Romania), Life Begins on Friday (2009)
Catalan: Eva Baltasar (Catalonia), Permafrost (2018)
English: Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), Claire of the Sea Light (2013); Valeria Luiselli (Mexico), Lost Children Archive (2019)
German: Herta Müller (Romania/Germany), The Hunger Angel (2009)

2. Displacement and Mobility in Latin American Narrative

This course examines various forms of displacement and mobility in Latin American narrative, from the conquest to the present. It proposes that displacement and mobility are central figures in the region’s literary imagination, continually reprised and replayed in sometimes surprising variations. From the violence of conquest to the itinerancy of capital, from the desperation of exile to the utopia of migration, the disruption of revolution or the smooth flows of neoliberalism, displacement and mobility have continually reshaped Latin American society and politics, uprooting populations and enabling lines of flight or escape, for better and for worse.

Though the set readings are still to be determined, these are some likely contenders…

Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires
Juan José Saer, The Witness
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism
José María Arguedas, Deep Rivers
Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
Tununa Mercado, In a State of Memory
Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban
Rita Indiana, Papi
Claudia Hernández, Slash and Burn
Emiliano Monge, Among the Lost
Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive