#  English 90lv. Consciousness in Fiction from Austen to Woolf 

 



Instructor: [James Wood](/people/james-wood)  
Monday, 3:45-5:45pm | Location: TBD  
*Enrollment: Limited to 15 students*

In this seminar, we look at the ways in which a range of writers represent the mind on the page: the mind at thought, in agitation, at rest, at prayer, in distress, in rebellion, and just doing nothing (or apparently nothing). This examination allows us to scrutinize just over a hundred years of novelistic development and experiment – from 1813 to 1927, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf – a period that might rightly be considered the high-point of the novel’s rise. We will discover that as the novelistic treatment of consciousness changes, so the idea of what a mind (or a self) is, also changes: the form (the means of representation) modifies the content (what is represented). What might seem at first like a fairly small thing – a question of novelistic technique – will turn out to have massive and far-reaching consequences for our sense of self. Writers studied: Austen, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Fontane, Woolf.  
  
This course satisfies the “1700-1900 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.



 



 

 See also:- [ 2025-26 ](/academic-year/2025-26)
- [ Undergraduate Seminars ](/course-type/3-undergraduate-seminars)
- [ Guided Elective: 1700-1900 ](/meets-requirements/guided-elective-1700-1900)
- [ Course ](/page-type/course)
- [ Fall 2025 ](/term/fall-2025)