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The Crucible Of Conversation: A Study Of Jamesean Dialogue, Betsy B. Aswad

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

My own initial bemused reaction to the language of Henry James I can place in a classroom in 1960 where, with a class of fellow English majors—-old hands, all of us, at Faulkner and Joyce–I was, in the first chapters of The Wings of the Dove, as “awfully at sea” as Merton Densher was when he first met Kate Croy. A timid question drew from the professor probably the best advice that can be given to a novice at reading James: “You can't just skim James, you know; you have to read every word.” Later, teaching The Turn of the …