Not just a writer, an artist, a novelist, but a prophet – which he gets to in a later lecture). He understands that Dickens is doing something different with “characters” than, say, Emily Bronte (whom he considered, along with Dostoevsky, a prophet. “round” is better than “flat”), although he does point out that “flat” characters don’t really work in tragedies. He does not place a judgment one way or the other, not really (i.e. In this lecture, Forster looks at the difference between what he characterizes as “flat” and “round” characters. What does “point of view” mean? What does character mean? How do you get “inside” a character’s experience? Some authors care about that, others don’t, they are up to something else. He devoted a couple of lectures to “characters,” under the heading “People.” Forster wanted to look at the different ways authors used characters. Story, characters, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm. Instead of moving through the timeline, he mucked it all up, and focused on what he saw were the 7 “aspects” of the English novel (and all novels, really, but he focused on English-speaking authors mainly in these lectures). Putting authors/genres/time-periods into separate buckets means you somehow miss the grand sweep of that huge thing called English literature. He wanted to look at things thematically and structurally, and wanted to avoid too much compartmentalization. He wanted to ignore chronology altogether, and put authors side by side who were, in actuality, separated by decades. In these 1927 lectures about “aspects of the novel,” Forster took an unconventional approach ( discussed here). NEXT BOOK: Aspects of the Novel, a series of lectures by E.M. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library.

Em forster aspects of novel