Robert Alter: The Language of Fiction

Overview

Few scholars have done more to illuminate the power of literary language than Robert Alter.

One of the most distinguished literary critics and translators of our time, Alter has spent more than six decades transforming how we read and understand literature, from the Hebrew Bible to the modern novel. Now, in his new book, The Language of Fiction: The Craft of Writing and the Pleasures of Reading, he turns his intellect and extraordinary gift for close reading to the art of fiction.

For Alter, the genius of a great novelist lies not simply in the stories they tell, but in the language through which entire worlds come alive. What can a single sentence reveal about a character, a culture, or the human condition? How does style shape meaning? And what do we lose when we read for plot alone?

Drawing on a lifetime of engagement with the world’s great writers — Jane Austen, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, Ann Patchett and more — Alter offers a master class in the pleasures and possibilities of literary language. He makes the case that the deepest pleasures of fiction lie not just in what a novel tells us, but in how its language teaches us to see. And in a moment when our attention is increasingly fragmented and language can be generated at the click of a button, he reminds us of the irreplaceable pleasures of great writing.

Hear from a towering figure in literary scholarship and translation as he explores the artistry of fiction: the rhythms of language and narrative voices that give novels their enduring power.

“In this exuberant meditation on the language of fiction, Robert Alter once again demonstrates that, as a sensitive reader of prose, he has no match.” — Gary Saul Morson