How does one depict the private ramifications of imperial decline? How might literature politicize otherwise private passions? Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus—a tragic romance of postwar social transformation that careens, like its eponymous phenomenon, from the 1940s to the 1960s and back—tracks the fortunes, material and emotional, of four young people: a working class astronomer, an elusive playwright, and a pair of Australian sisters who’ve taken up residence in England. Interspersing flashbacks to the collective hardships of two world wars with leaps in time and space that map the emerging Pax Americana of the Cold War years, Hazzard, like Joseph Conrad before her, imagines global history at the scale of generations, intimate and morally ambiguous. In the chiseled poetry of her prose style, she advocates for beauty—even if as compensation for the leveling and confining effects of the “affluent society.” How can we read the massive changes and cascading damages wrought by thirty years of war through the private lives, furtive affairs, partial knowledge, and perseverance of four young people seeking their own ground? How does the past pressurize and help to provision new forms of identity and new ways of living?
In this course, we will read Hazzard’s novel in full, alongside a selection of her short stories, essays, interviews, and biographical accounts of her life. Hazzard drew extensively for her fiction on her own experiences as an Australian ex-pat, from sojourns in Hong Kong, Italy, and England to her work with the United Nations in New York and that city’s postwar literary scene. Questions we will consider include: To what extent did social democracy and the end of empire loosen the old British hierarchies and invigorate creative mobility from below? How does Hazzard mediate the shift of the imperial metropole, from London to New York, through her own literary aesthetics, which developed in conversation with New York’s intelligentsia? How should we describe Hazzard’s formal achievements, in both style and structure, within the longer tradition of the British novel? And, finally, what affinities with the current moment have sparked the revival of interest in Hazzard’s work?
Note:
There *is* no physical Brooklyn Institute. We hold our classes all over (thus far) Brooklyn and Manhattan, in alternative spaces ranging from the back rooms of bars to bookstores to spaces in cultural centers, including the Center for Jewish History, the Goethe-Institut, and the Barnard Center for Research on Women. We can (and do) turn any space into a classroom. You will be notified of the exact location when you register for a class.
