As I prepare to teach a new course in the fall—The English Novel—I’ve been preparing the best way I know how: by watching lectures on youtube. Yesterday, I found this lecture given by Dr. Melanie Holm, an IUPUI professor, who posted some lectures from her graduate course on the origins of the English novel. The lecture I watched covered the introduction to Michael McKeon’s influential book titled…wait for it…The Origins of the English Novel.
Holm knows her stuff. She elicits the questions that the introduction provoked in her students then proceeds to work through McKeon’s argument. Her focus is less on McKeon’s thesis—that the rise of the English novel coincides with the rise of the English middle class—than how a critical theorist like McKeon makes his argument. In short, you can learn as much by following the way someone makes an argument as you can by simply reading someone’s thesis.
McKeon’s chief insight is to analogize Marx’s analysis of political economy—the dialectical method—to the historical formation of genre. McKeon manages to synthesize the structuralist critics like Frye with more dialogic critics like Bakhtin to put a properly historical spin on the novel’s origins. McKeon’s prose is knotty, and Holm does a good job of unpacking these dense ideas in ways that were easier to grasp.
But my main takeaway from the lecture was not something about the novel’s origins. It was Holm’s words of encouragement to her students about how to read. To put it bluntly, she talked to her graduate students like they were disciples. Holm urged her students to keep reading even when they got confused because it would all make sense in the end. They simply had to have faith, and they would see that McKeon’s way of getting to his main point—the journey—would be just as meaningful as the main point itself—his destination.
Holm advocated for a kind of providential reading, even though she seemed to buy McKeon’s secularizing thesis about how people rejected scriptural truth authority did not appear to be a Christ follower. Still, Holm’s language indicates that how we read, our posture towards reading, can be a way to work our discipleship. We can believe and hope with faith because our relationship to language and meaning has Christ at its center.