Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose

Vidyan Ravinthiran, Associate Professor of English Literature, Harvard University

Vidyan Ravinthiran is Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard and he is author of two award-winning books of verse. His first monograph, Elizabeth Bishop's Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015) won both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism. He has compiled editions of Indian poets and has published a range of both scholarly and journalistic articles on the cognitions of form in both poetry and prose, encompassing works from multiple time-periods and nations. He helps organize Ledbury Emerging Critics, a UK/US scheme for increasing racial diversity in review-culture.

1. Introduction
2. William Hazlitt's Spontaneous Journalism
3. The Crisis Prose of Emerson and Whitman: Hinduism, Convulsive Forms, and Moonlight
4. "In some spontaneous way, so to speak": The Journal-Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins
5. Herman Melville's Heart and Billy Budd's Overflowing Soup
6. The Aesthetics of Outburst: D.H. Lawrence and Saul Bellow
7. Virginia Woolf, Marion Milner, Spontaneous Ordering Forces, and the Reclaiming of Gendered Passiveness
8. Reading Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha, in the Meantime
9. Adil Jussawalla: The Journalist as Lyric Activist
10. Conclusion: Digital Spontaneity Today, and in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah