The modern novel, so the story goes, thinks poorly of mere description — what Virginia Woolf called “that ugly, that clumsy, that incongruous tool.” As a result, critics have largely neglected description as a feature of novelistic innovation during the 20th century.

In her book, Strange Likeness (Chicago, 2020), Dora Zhang (Comparative Literature and English) argues that descriptive practices were in fact a crucial site of attention and experimentation for a number of early modernist writers, including Woolf, Henry James, and Marcel Proust.

She is joined by Ramsey McGlazer (Comparative Literature).