Stanford Humanities Center
Alex Woloch is the Richard W. Lyman Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English at Stanford. He teaches and writes about literary criticism, narrative theory, the history and theory of the novel, and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. He is the author of two prize-winning books, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton UP, 2003) and Or Orwell: Writing and Democratic Socialism (Harvard UP, 2016) as well as articles and essays on nineteenth-century literature and other topics.
SHC Project
Partial Representation
This project considers ways that realist art recruits formal constraints and blind spots into its own mimetic practice. I focus on literary acts of representation that work not just by what they show and detail, but by what is obscured, exaggerated, blocked and effaced. Highlighting realism’s capacity for self-conscious distortion and incompleteness, I argue against accounts that dismiss the category of realism altogether or equate it with a naïve or ideologically benighted understanding of representation. Partial Representation builds on my previous scholarship, which has offered new ways to understand the dynamic relationship between form and social representation. My current focus is a set of nineteenth-century novels that intensify the stakes of fictional representation while also problematizing the reader’s own internal mastery of the narrative. These are works, in other words, urgently committed to the project of representation but extravagantly difficult to hold in mind or to definitively encompass.
