Clark Lectures/ E. M. Forster:

Clark Lectures/ E. M. Forster: Aspects of the Novel Clark Lectures

Past Clark Lecturers

The Clark Lectures are on aspects of English literature. Past Clark Lecturers have included T.S. Eliot (1926, published as The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry), E.M. Forster (1927, Aspects of the Novel), C.S. Lewis (1944, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century), Dame Helen Darbishire (1949, The Poet Wordsworth), F.R. Leavis (1967, English Literature in Our Time and the University), Richard Rorty (1987, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity), Toni Morrison (1990), Rowan Williams (2005), Seamus Heaney (2006), Elaine Scarry (2007), Frank Kermode (2007), Roy Foster (2009) and Roger Chartier (2009). Lent 2010 The Clark Lecturer for the Lent term 2010 is Prof. Clive Scott, Professor of European Literature UEA. TRANSLATION AND THE RESURRECTION OF READING Clark Lecture 1: Wednesday 20 January Reading and Translation Clark Lecture 2: Wednesday 27 January Reading: Voice and Rhythm Clark Lecture 3: Wednesday 03 February Reading and the Ambient (1) Clark Lecture 4: Wednesday 10 February Reading and the Ambient (2) These lectures will take place at 5 p.m. in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre. They are open to all, with no ticket required.

E. M. Forster: Aspects of the Novel
(1927)

• Peter Childs (University of Gloucestershire)

A series of Clark Lectures given at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the year after T. S. Eliot had delivered them, Aspects of the Novel (1927) was written after Forster had finished with novel writing. It is an idiosyncratic survey of fiction from Defoe to Joyce. The lectures were delivered between January and March 1927 and were less academic expositions than one author's perspective on literary history, style and form. One attendee, F. R. Leavis, found them “intellectually null”, but they were a great success. On the strength of the lectures, King's College offered Forster a three-year fellowship, which he accepted.

Forster defines the novel as any work of prose fiction, and he discusses it in terms of character, plot

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First published 08 January 2001

Citation: Childs, Peter. "Aspects of the Novel". The Literary Encyclopedia. 08 January 2001

[http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=6532, accessed 24 April 2010.]

• "A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist. He has to have a wide outlook or he has not anything at all."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "We are to visualize the English novelists not as floating down the stream [of time] ... but as seated together in a room, a circular room, a sort of British museum reading room, all writing their novels simultaneously."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "The final test of a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, of anything else which we cannot define."

• "The time-sequence cannot be destroyed without carrying in its ruin all that should have taken its place; the novel that would express values only becomes unintelligible and therefore valueless."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "A memoir is history, it is based on evidence. A novel is based on evidence plus or minus x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "These are the creatures whom the novelist proposes to introduce as characters into books; these, or creatures plausibly like them."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "All history, all our experience, teaches us that no human relationship is constant, it is as unstable as the living beings who compose it, and they must balance like jugglers if it is to remain; if it is constant it is no longer a human relationship but a social habit, the emphasis in it has passed from love to marriage."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "Any strong emotion brings with it the illusion of permanence, and the novelists have seized upon this. They usually end their books with marriage, and we do not object because we lend them our dreams."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "The test of a round character is whether it is capable of surprising in a convincing way. If it never surprises, it is flat. If it does not convince, it is a flat pretending to be round. It has the incalculability of life about it—life within the pages of a book."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "The novelist who betrays too much interest in his own method can never be more than interesting; he has given up the creation of character and summoned us to help analyze his own mind, and a heavy drop in the emotional thermometer results."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "Why place an angel on a different basis from a stockbroker? Once in the realm of the fictious, what difference is there between an apparition and a mortgage?"
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "The stuff of daily life will be tugged and strained in various directions, the earth will be given little tilts mischievous or pensive, spot lights will fall on objects that have no reason to anticipate or welcome them, and tragedy herself, though not excluded, will have a fortuitous air as if a word would disarm her."
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  
  
• "Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is there not something of it [that can bring us to] a larger existence than was possible at the time?"
  - E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel