TARA MENON: Hello, congratulations, first of all. You'll be told that all day. But I remember how exciting it felt to be accepted into college. And you should enjoy that feeling. Live in it a little bit. What I'm going to do in the next 10 minutes is convince you that not only should you read novels for pleasure on your own, which you should, but that you should study them in a class. 

I'm going to convince you that you should spend some of your time at Harvard reading and studying literature. Even if you don't concentrate in English or in the humanities, you should, without question, take a class about literature and about novels. As Joy mentioned, I'm an assistant professor in the English department here. And I teach classes on cities, on how to read politically, and on 19th century novels. That's what I'll be teaching this fall. 

My research focuses on speech in 19th century novels, on the parts of a novel when characters speak in their own words. This is hugely important when we read fiction because speech plays a significant role in making us believe that characters are real. 

When we read a novel and we believe characters to be people that we can love, and hate, admire, be irritated by, a big reason that we can do that is because we hear them speaking in their own words. I study speech in the novel. And I use computational tools to help me. 

Here is a graph that I made. Each dot on that graph represents a single novel. There are 898 novels in this data set. And one really simple finding is that most of these novels contain a lot of speech. 

But I also use computational tools to study individual novels, and specifically, canonical novels. That is the most famous novels by the most famous authors of the 19th century. And when I do that, I can see, for instance, how many characters there are in specific novels. This kind of work was made with the help of a team of research assistants. 

But what I want to do today is talk a little bit more about one of my more interesting findings, which is that of these many characters, a substantial number of them are unnamed. That is they're very minor characters who appear very briefly, sometimes just once, and then they disappear, never to be heard from or seen again. 

No one had really noticed these characters before. No one had commented on them. And so when I discovered the presence of them, how many unnamed characters there are in these novels, I wanted to understand why. Why did these novels include these characters who seemed so unimportant, so trivial, so forgettable? 

So after I produced this graph, I looked for moments in the novel when these unnamed characters appear. And here is one example. This is a moment from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, when young Jane is traveling alone. And she speaks to the driver of a stagecoach right before he takes her to the place where she will start work as a governess. 

The illustration that you can see of the stagecoach on your right is from the Houghton Library here at Harvard. It's a magnificent, world-class collection of manuscripts and books. What I realized when I read a moment like this one between Jane Eyre and the nameless stagecoach driver was that the many unnamed characters in 19th century novels existed to show something fundamental about society in the 19th century, that is the prevalence of anonymous interactions. 

What is an anonymous interaction? It's when people who don't know each other, two people who don't know each other, don't even know each other's names, talk to each other briefly. Anonymous interactions were a new kind of social relation in the rapidly changing, newly industrialized, newly commercial, newly capitalist society of 19th century England, a society that was very different from the one that came before, the feudal mostly rural one, where everyone knows each other, is connected to each other. 

What novelists like Charlotte Bronte are doing when they include anonymous interactions in their fiction is theorizing the effects of this new social relation. The first thing to notice about anonymous interactions like this one is that there is something neutral, dependable, fundamentally cooperative about the nature of life in modern society. 

Jane and the driver don't know each other. They're not related to each other. But they cooperate. Jane wants to go from point A to point B. The driver takes her from point A to point B for a fee. Importantly, anonymous interactions are not just a new feature of life in the 19th century. They're also a regular feature of our life today, our life in modern capitalist society. You could imagine an updated version of this exchange with an Uber driver, for example. 

We are, especially in cities, surrounded by people who are strangers to us, but who we sometimes speak to, even if only briefly. We live in a world in which anonymous interactions are routine. I imagine, in fact, that you might even have had an anonymous interaction today. Maybe you bought a coffee, or a bottle of water, or a snack. And you spoke briefly to the barista or the cashier. 

Even if you didn't have one today, I want you to imagine an encounter with a barista, to try and understand the positive nature of the anonymous interaction. They're reciprocal. You pay for coffee, you get a coffee. They're polite. You ask for a coffee nicely. And even though they're not intimate, they're social. The barista might ask, how are you doing today? 

In fact, I would go one step further. Sometimes, there's something comforting, even liberating about interacting with strangers in the public sphere. Unlike your parents, or your siblings, or your friends, strangers don't know anything about you. You don't know anything about them. You're not dependent on their moods. They're not-- they don't care about your moods. You don't have to ask for a favor and hope that you're in their good graces. All you need is some money. And they will provide you what you want. 

For someone like Jane, who has pretty terrible relatives, who treat her very badly, this is a huge relief. All she has to do is pay the driver. And he will take her to her destination. But anonymous interactions are not all positive. What they also reveal is the alienation, estrangement, and isolation of life in the public sphere. 

What anonymous interactions show is that unlike in village life, in which people know each other, care about each other, are bound to each other by familial and social ties, in modern capitalist society, people who live in close physical proximity with each other are fundamentally disconnected. Modern society is made up of isolated individuals who are not connected by any meaningful bonds. 

Think again about Jane, about the stagecoach driver. He doesn't know her. He doesn't care about her. Despite their brief and benign encounter, Jane is alone and isolated here. And most importantly, the only reason that the interaction works is because Jane has money. She can pay for the service that the driver offers. 

Now, think again about the interaction with the barista. For all of you, that interaction is benign, even pleasant, maybe even pleasurable. But that's because you have the money to pay for the coffee. Imagine now that you didn't. Or rather, imagine someone who doesn't. Maybe a homeless person, maybe one of the homeless people that you saw outside the coffee shop. 

People without money or without sufficient money are locked out of the world of quick and pleasant financial transactions. They can't benefit from anonymous interactions in the way that we can. What studying anonymous interactions and 19th century novels let me see more clearly is the dual nature of life in the modern public sphere. 

It can be dependable, pleasant, cooperative. It can even be liberating to escape the private sphere, to not depend on the goodwill of friends or family. But depending on who you are and what resources you have, the public sphere can also be lonely, even isolating, even dangerous. 

OK, now you might be asking, what does all this have to do with the title of your talk? Why read novels? What I've told you about anonymous interactions in the 19th century novel illustrates in miniature why I think it's important to read novels. First, novels can teach us about different times and places. Second, novels can teach us how to see the world that we are living in new, with fresh eyes. 

But I want now to make an even bolder argument about why you should read and study literature. Which is that reading fiction enables a certain kind of thinking. To read literature, to read novels is to consider questions, to hold questions up to the light. And asking questions is of utmost importance to the world today. 

We live in a world which is increasingly siloed, in which people live in bubbles, a world where people are increasingly sure that their way of seeing the world is the right way, that their views are correct. They come to issues, political issues, social issues with ready-made answers. This rigid way of thinking, thinking that is led by belief, by certainty gets us nowhere. It is, frankly, anti-intellectual. 

The world is not a simple place. It's not a black and white place. It's a difficult place, a complex one. And if you want to understand it, if you want to think more clearly about it, you have to lay orthodoxy aside. You have to lay conviction aside, and embrace, even if only temporarily, uncertainty. You have to embrace asking questions and then staying open as you test answers. 

What reading novels does is let us practice asking questions in order to think through complex social and political issues. To read properly, openly, carefully is to escape a world in which everyone already knows the answers. This is not to say, I want to be clear, that there are no answers. I am not that kind of English professor. 

But rather, that the way to get the right answers is by first recognizing which questions need to be asked. In our increasingly politicized world, in which people want to unilaterally declare which answers are the acceptable ones and outside actors want to determine what gets taught and studied at a university like this one, literature offers a place of escape, an antidote because it is a place that you can think through questions freely by thinking through the lives of fictional people, through other perspectives. 

What I'm saying is take a literature class at Harvard. And don't take it because somebody told you that reading novels will make you a better person. You should read novels because they will make you a better thinker. 

[APPLAUSE]