Steven Schwartz: Mythic Characters (July 2009)

Some of the most memorable and famous characters in literature—Kurtz, Gatsby, Bartleby, The Misfit—are often the most psychologically inaccessible, viewed only from the outside, opaque surfaces onto which other characters’ projections can be mapped.  In this lecture, Steven Schwartz looks at fiction by Joseph Conrad, Flannery O’Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Herman Melville, Joyce Carol Oates, Steven Millhauser, Katherine Anne Porter and J.D. Salinger to investigate how such mythic characters are made.