Robert Boswell: Complex Moments in Fiction (July 2010)

Most readers have had the experience of responding viscerally to a particular moment in a piece of fiction; in this lecture, Robert Boswell considers how such “complex moments” are made. Through close readings of work by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, E.M. Forster, William Faulkner, and Kazuo Ishiguro, Boswell suggests that narratives have horizontal and vertical planes, and that writers can manage the intersections between these planes to create moments of lasting resonance.