THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Introduction to Year Three
tertium quid
Welcome back to the The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. 2026 is year three of this project; all prior episodes and syllabi can be found here in reverse chronological order. Here is the 2026 syllabus:
As you can see, I have tried to take your suggestions and interests into account, along with my own taste and curiosity, as we develop a more and more complete map of the western literary tradition. (Maybe we’ll go east next year if your support for this project continues.) I have strayed further away this year from an academic “semester” structure, but 2026’s six “units” can be divided into three sections.1
In winter and spring comes what I think of as the “Great Books Boot Camp”2 many readers seem to desire in this unreaderly world of ours, with a strong focus on long novels and epic poems from January through May. First, in a belated celebration of the novel’s 2025 centenary, we will spend four weeks sojourning on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Then, having become briefly acquainted with everybody’s favorite Russian novelists last year, we will devote six weeks to a deeper exploration of that classic question, “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?,” when we read Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov. Next we will return to the epic tradition; we read Homer and Milton last year, but what about the major intervening figures? To answer this question we will take up Virgil’s Aeneid and Dante’s Divine Comedy as we think about the movement from pagan and classical to Christian and medieval epic. Finally, we will deepen our acquaintance with the modern French novel by exploring Stendhal, Sand, Balzac, and Zola; and, having read Swann’s Way by Proust last year, we will advance in the Recherche this year to its second volume, Within a Budding Grove.3
We will relax in the summer months with more unfamiliar, curious, playful, or experimental work of a modern or contemporary vintage. First, in token of the United States’s Semiquincentennial, we will examine two American historical novels I myself have never read before, written by authors better known and loved to us all as essayists rather than novelists: Burr by Gore Vidal and In America by Susan Sontag.4 Then a trilogy on writers whose lives and works cross both artistic and geographic boundaries, boundaries between poetry and prose, narrative and lyric, North and South America: Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, and Clarice Lispector.5 Finally, after we studied Borges last year, I thought we should look at his literary progeny in the two most celebrated and influential Latin American novelists of their respective generations: Gabriel García Márquez, here represented by his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude; and Roberto Bolaño, here represented by the novel that shot him to international acclaim, The Savage Detectives.
Then in the fall we return to where The Invisible College started with a look at 19th- and 20th-century British literature; whereas we spent more time on poetry in 2024, we will now focus on the development of the novel. This will be a semi-chronological and semi-thematic survey of the English novel from the early 1800s to the early 2000s, organized around everybody’s favorite -ism words, such as realism or postmodernism, which, to be clear, I take with a grain of salt. A few authors re-appear from 2024’s BritLit survey, but most are new to The Invisible College. I trust the selections are self-explanatory, and, if not, I’ll explain them when we get there.6 We will conclude, in simultaneous defiance of chronology and celebration of the holiday season, with a Dickensian December devoted to that King of the Novel’s delirious panorama of Victorian London, what many have called his greatest novel: Bleak House.7
Happy New Year, and I’ll see you back here for the first episode of 2026 on January 16. Thanks to all my current and future paid subscribers for supporting this project!
Please note that the schedule is sometimes weekly and sometimes biweekly depending on subject and circumstance. (It’s mostly weekly in the first and final thirds and mostly biweekly in the middle, as I find engagement tends to drop in the summer anyway, maybe conditioned by the “college” conceit.) I also conclude the schedule earlier in December than I’ve done in prior years. These “gaps” in the schedule will allow for a more leisurely reading pace as well as granting us some leeway if I ever have to cancel a week here or there.
I’m not trying to be facetious, but I have tried to stay away from a wall-of-leatherbound-volumes or Greek-statue-decorated “Great Books” branding for The Invisible College. The two reasons to read Virgil or Dante or Dostoevsky or Mann are 1. that they shaped the world we still inhabit; and 2. that they are not so much timeless as “untimely,” to use Nietzsche’s word, durably strange and therefore usefully estranging. They are ours and not ours, us and not us, visions of who we have been and might have been and still might be or don’t ever want to be. Decking them out in leather or marble, treating them like a solemn duty rather than a weird pleasure, makes us forget this “permanent revolution” of great art. And yet, if the people want the boot camp, I’ll give the people the boot camp!
All the works in the first third of the year and some in the second are translated; here are my thoughts about translation from last year, encouraging people to take a calm, philosophical, detached approach to the subject. I can tell you for sure I will be using Woods’s translation of Mann, Pevear and Volokhonsky’s of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Moncrieff’s of Proust, and of course, as these are the only ones out there, Rabassa’s of García Márquez and Wimmer’s of Bolaño. (For my defense of the controversial Russian translators Pevear and Volokhonsky, please see here.) I’m less certain at the moment which translations of the other authors I’ll be reading. My notes are in Mandelbaum’s Dante, which also has the advantage of the Italian on the facing pages, and which I love as English poetry; but I also recently acquired a copy of the modernist-era translation by Pound’s friend and collaborator Laurence Binyon and may give that a try; we’ll see. In any case, there is no need to read the same translation I’m reading, and I will specify which I’m using on each episode.
My Vidal selection was influenced by Ross Barkan’s advocacy (“Burr can sit against the best of Roth, Updike, and DeLillo”), while my Sontag selection was inspired by my appreciation (see here and scroll down) for her earlier historical novel The Volcano Lover. I’ve become more aggressive in general this year about “book club” selections, that is, books I myself have not yet read but want to read, and which we will be investigating together for the first time. But I’m not going to tell you what they all are here. (I don’t need it in writing how little Zola I’ve read!) The only other “book club” choice I will explain or defend in these footnotes is the Iris Murdoch novel in the English sequence. While everybody loves the Booker-winning The Sea, the Sea, there’s no real consensus either on Murdoch’s masterpiece or on the best place to start with her oeuvre; I only began reading her recently and have so many of her novels left to go—she wrote 26!—that I want to read a new one this year. A Fairly Honourable Defeat is among her most celebrated, touted in some quarters as her artistic breakthrough, and Substack’s resident Murdochian, Mary Jane Eyre, has rated it second-best behind The Sea, the Sea. Murdoch is not hard to read, so it doesn’t really matter where you start—I myself started with The Bell—because you’ll soon be reading more.
I know we’re drastically under-emphasizing modern and contemporary poetry this year, but I hope Bishop and Carson can make up for it. As for the almost universally beloved Lispector, I have a checkered history with her prose, which I’ve often found pretty abstract for my tastes—Bishop, who translated her stories, wrote in a letter that “her novels are NOT good”—but several readers have urged me to work on it, so I will, and in plain view.
I hesitated over which Lawrence to cover. His re-appearance from the 2024 syllabus is warranted because we only encountered Lawrence the short story writer, poet, and essayist then, and not Lawrence the novelist. But which novel? Sons and Lovers, his autobiographical breakthrough? It’s undeniably powerful, but probably not his best. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his last and most notorious? It’s historically important, but definitely not his best. The Plumed Serpent, his quasi-fascist New World spiritual testament? Helpfully insane, but too niche. Kangaroo and Aaron’s Rod? I haven’t read them yet and didn’t want to chance them in public. Women in Love, the consensus masterpiece? That one might be his best, but it’s a sequel to The Rainbow. So I chose The Rainbow, which is strange and disturbing and extraordinary and beautiful, and contains everything he can do in a single book. I explain my Murdoch choice in footnote 3 above. Orlando is here because I always tell people to try its rollicking proto-postmodern magic-realist metafiction if they think they don’t like Woolf because they didn’t enjoy the more solemn stream-of-consciousness modernism of Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse (we covered the latter in 2024). I wanted to revisit Jane Austen, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Joseph Conrad, too, and to visit Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Salman Rushdie, Jeannette Winterson, the Amises, and more for the first time, but there just isn’t world enough and time for everything. And much as I love some of our authors’ “second masterpieces”—Shelley’s The Last Man, Brontë’s Villette, Forster’s A Passage to India—I thought it best to stay on the introductory side for now.
“King of the Novel” is John Irving’s phrase for his and our role model, though that sentimentalist favors, I believe, the Bildungsromane David Copperfield and Great Expectations. I love them, too—see here and here—but Bleak House and its unreal city offer us less tear-jerking coming-of-age fairy-tale Dickens (though we may cry a little, I’m sure) than high-visionary heterocosmic street-seer Dickens, the Dickens who could have been Blake’s son, Melville’s and Dostoevsky’s brother, the father of Kafka, Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, the grandfather of the Nabokov who extolled Bleak House in Lectures on Literature, and the great-grandfather of our own Thomas Pynchon.
The choices look great but this pace is just too relentless
I hope you enjoy G.H! It might not be the one I’d have picked, but it is imo her best novel. A real embarrassment of riches as always!