Donahue’s Trouble Begins Lecture Now Available

Yesterday the public was invited to attend the third installment of the 2024 Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series, presented by the Center for Mark Twain Studies and supported by the generous donations of The Mark Twain Foundation.

Entitled “Mark Twain, the Novel, and 1492,” the presentation asks, “What if we considered Mark Twain not just as a novelist but also as a novel theorist—that is, as an intellectual aiming to account for the novel-genre’s historical origins and its aesthetic and political prospects?” Donahue will pursue this line of inquiry through a reading of Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. 

Donahue posits that Twain offers an alternative origin story to the novel and endeavors to create a democratic novelistic form as a counterpoint to colonial modernity’s hierarchies of race and geography. Twain frames No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger and another late speculative fiction, 3,000 Years among the Microbes, as translations, suggesting the novel-genre might be thought of as a vehicle for carrying meaning across differences in space, time, culture, and language. This notion of the novel-genre-as-translation is Twain’s effort to imagine how novelistic form could be democratic within a colonial modernity.

Timothy Donahue is Associate Professor of English at Oakland University, where he teaches and researches the literatures of the U.S. and the Americas, with a focus on the nineteenth century. His writing has appeared in American Literary History, Novel, and J19, as well as in the collections The Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture. He is currently finishing a book on aesthetics, translation, and political sovereignty in North America’s nineteenth-century borderlands and beginning a second project on Reconstruction’s hemispheric dimensions.

The remaining lectures in this year’s Fall Trouble Begins Lecture Series are listed below. All lectures are free and open to the public. Find recordings of previous lectures here. 

• 7:00 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 23, at the Barn at Quarry Farm: “Before There Was Twain There Was Whitcher” by Linda A. Morris, University of California, Davis 

About The Trouble Begins Lecture Series

In 1984, the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies initiated a lecture series, The Trouble Begins at Eight lecture series. The title came from the handbill advertising Mark Twain’s October 2, 1866 lecture presented at Maguire’s Academy of Music in San Francisco. The first lectures were presented in 1985. By invitation, Mark Twain scholars present lectures in the fall and spring of each year, in the Barn at Quarry Farm or at Peterson Chapel in Cowles Hall on Elmira College’s campus. All lectures are free and open to the public.