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TARA MENON: Hello,
congratulations, first of all.

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You'll be told that all day.

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But I remember how exciting it
felt to be accepted into college.

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And you should enjoy that feeling.

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Live in it a little bit.

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What I'm going to do
in the next 10 minutes

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is convince you that not only should you
read novels for pleasure on your own,

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which you should, but that you
should study them in a class.

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I'm going to convince you that
you should spend some of your time

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at Harvard reading and
studying literature.

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Even if you don't concentrate
in English or in the humanities,

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you should, without question, take a
class about literature and about novels.

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As Joy mentioned, I'm an assistant
professor in the English department

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here.

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And I teach classes on cities,
on how to read politically,

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and on 19th century novels.

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That's what I'll be teaching this fall.

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My research focuses on speech
in 19th century novels,

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on the parts of a novel when
characters speak in their own words.

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This is hugely important
when we read fiction

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because speech plays a
significant role in making

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us believe that characters are real.

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When we read a novel and
we believe characters

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to be people that we can
love, and hate, admire,

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be irritated by, a
big reason that we can

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do that is because we hear them
speaking in their own words.

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I study speech in the novel.

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And I use computational
tools to help me.

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Here is a graph that I made.

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Each dot on that graph
represents a single novel.

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There are 898 novels in this data set.

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And one really simple finding
is that most of these novels

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contain a lot of speech.

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But I also use computational
tools to study individual novels,

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and specifically, canonical novels.

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That is the most famous novels by the
most famous authors of the 19th century.

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And when I do that, I can see,
for instance, how many characters

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there are in specific novels.

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This kind of work was made with the
help of a team of research assistants.

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But what I want to do today
is talk a little bit more

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about one of my more
interesting findings,

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which is that of these many characters,
a substantial number of them

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are unnamed.

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That is they're very minor characters
who appear very briefly, sometimes just

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once, and then they disappear, never
to be heard from or seen again.

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No one had really noticed
these characters before.

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No one had commented on them.

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And so when I discovered
the presence of them,

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how many unnamed characters
there are in these novels,

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I wanted to understand why.

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Why did these novels
include these characters

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who seemed so unimportant,
so trivial, so forgettable?

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So after I produced this graph,
I looked for moments in the novel

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when these unnamed characters appear.

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And here is one example.

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This is a moment from
Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre,

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when young Jane is traveling alone.

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And she speaks to the
driver of a stagecoach right

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before he takes her to the place where
she will start work as a governess.

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The illustration that you can see
of the stagecoach on your right

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is from the Houghton
Library here at Harvard.

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It's a magnificent, world-class
collection of manuscripts and books.

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What I realized when I read a moment
like this one between Jane Eyre

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and the nameless stagecoach driver was
that the many unnamed characters in 19th

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century novels existed to show something
fundamental about society in the 19th

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century, that is the prevalence
of anonymous interactions.

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What is an anonymous interaction?

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It's when people who
don't know each other,

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two people who don't know each other,
don't even know each other's names,

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talk to each other briefly.

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Anonymous interactions were a new
kind of social relation in the rapidly

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changing, newly industrialized,
newly commercial,

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newly capitalist society
of 19th century England,

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a society that was very different
from the one that came before,

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the feudal mostly rural one,
where everyone knows each other,

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is connected to each other.

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What novelists like
Charlotte Bronte are doing

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when they include anonymous
interactions in their fiction

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is theorizing the effects
of this new social relation.

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The first thing to notice about
anonymous interactions like this one

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is that there is something
neutral, dependable, fundamentally

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cooperative about the nature
of life in modern society.

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Jane and the driver
don't know each other.

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They're not related to each other.

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But they cooperate.

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Jane wants to go from point A to point
B. The driver takes her from point A

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to point B for a fee.

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Importantly, anonymous interactions
are not just a new feature of life

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in the 19th century.

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They're also a regular
feature of our life today,

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our life in modern capitalist society.

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You could imagine an updated version
of this exchange with an Uber driver,

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for example.

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We are, especially in cities, surrounded
by people who are strangers to us,

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but who we sometimes speak
to, even if only briefly.

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We live in a world in which
anonymous interactions are routine.

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I imagine, in fact, that you might even
have had an anonymous interaction today.

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Maybe you bought a coffee, or
a bottle of water, or a snack.

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And you spoke briefly to
the barista or the cashier.

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Even if you didn't
have one today, I want

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you to imagine an
encounter with a barista,

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to try and understand the positive
nature of the anonymous interaction.

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They're reciprocal.

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You pay for coffee, you get a coffee.

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They're polite.

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You ask for a coffee nicely.

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And even though they're not
intimate, they're social.

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The barista might ask,
how are you doing today?

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In fact, I would go one step further.

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Sometimes, there's
something comforting, even

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liberating about interacting with
strangers in the public sphere.

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Unlike your parents, or your
siblings, or your friends,

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strangers don't know anything about you.

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You don't know anything about them.

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You're not dependent on their moods.

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They're not-- they don't
care about your moods.

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You don't have to ask for a favor and
hope that you're in their good graces.

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All you need is some money.

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And they will provide you what you want.

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For someone like Jane, who has pretty
terrible relatives, who treat her

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very badly, this is a huge relief.

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All she has to do is pay the driver.

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And he will take her to her destination.

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But anonymous interactions
are not all positive.

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What they also reveal is the
alienation, estrangement, and isolation

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of life in the public sphere.

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What anonymous interactions
show is that unlike in village

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life, in which people know each
other, care about each other,

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are bound to each other by
familial and social ties,

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in modern capitalist society, people
who live in close physical proximity

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with each other are
fundamentally disconnected.

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Modern society is made up of
isolated individuals who are not

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connected by any meaningful bonds.

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Think again about Jane,
about the stagecoach driver.

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He doesn't know her.

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He doesn't care about her.

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Despite their brief
and benign encounter,

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Jane is alone and isolated here.

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And most importantly, the only
reason that the interaction works

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is because Jane has money.

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She can pay for the service
that the driver offers.

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Now, think again about the
interaction with the barista.

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For all of you, that interaction
is benign, even pleasant,

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maybe even pleasurable.

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But that's because you have the
money to pay for the coffee.

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Imagine now that you didn't.

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Or rather, imagine someone who doesn't.

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Maybe a homeless person, maybe
one of the homeless people

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that you saw outside the coffee shop.

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People without money or
without sufficient money

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are locked out of the world of quick
and pleasant financial transactions.

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They can't benefit from anonymous
interactions in the way that we can.

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What studying anonymous interactions
and 19th century novels let me see more

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clearly is the dual nature of
life in the modern public sphere.

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It can be dependable,
pleasant, cooperative.

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It can even be liberating to
escape the private sphere,

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to not depend on the goodwill
of friends or family.

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But depending on who you are
and what resources you have,

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the public sphere can also be lonely,
even isolating, even dangerous.

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OK, now you might be asking,
what does all this have

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to do with the title of your talk?

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Why read novels?

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What I've told you about anonymous
interactions in the 19th century novel

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illustrates in miniature why I
think it's important to read novels.

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First, novels can teach us about
different times and places.

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Second, novels can teach us
how to see the world that we

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are living in new, with fresh eyes.

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But I want now to make an
even bolder argument about why

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you should read and study literature.

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Which is that reading fiction
enables a certain kind of thinking.

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To read literature, to read
novels is to consider questions,

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to hold questions up to the light.

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And asking questions is of utmost
importance to the world today.

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We live in a world which is increasingly
siloed, in which people live in bubbles,

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a world where people are increasingly
sure that their way of seeing the world

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is the right way, that
their views are correct.

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They come to issues, political issues,
social issues with ready-made answers.

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This rigid way of thinking, thinking
that is led by belief, by certainty

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gets us nowhere.

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It is, frankly, anti-intellectual.

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The world is not a simple place.

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It's not a black and white place.

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It's a difficult place, a complex one.

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And if you want to understand it, if
you want to think more clearly about it,

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you have to lay orthodoxy aside.

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You have to lay conviction aside, and
embrace, even if only temporarily,

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uncertainty.

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You have to embrace asking questions and
then staying open as you test answers.

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What reading novels does is let
us practice asking questions

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in order to think through complex
social and political issues.

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To read properly, openly, carefully
is to escape a world in which everyone

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already knows the answers.

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This is not to say, I want to be
clear, that there are no answers.

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I am not that kind of English professor.

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But rather, that the
way to get the right

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answers is by first recognizing
which questions need to be asked.

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In our increasingly
politicized world, in which

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people want to unilaterally declare
which answers are the acceptable ones

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and outside actors want to determine
what gets taught and studied

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at a university like
this one, literature

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offers a place of escape,
an antidote because it

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is a place that you can
think through questions

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freely by thinking through
the lives of fictional people,

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through other perspectives.

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What I'm saying is take a
literature class at Harvard.

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And don't take it
because somebody told you

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that reading novels will
make you a better person.

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You should read novels because they
will make you a better thinker.

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[APPLAUSE]