Reading Group: Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume, parts 1-4, with Professor Paul Kelleher

NOVEL THEORY

SPEAKER: Paul Kelleher, Emory University

As her November 18 repeats itself for the one hundred and twenty-fourth time, Tara Selter describes how the text we hold in our hands came to be: “Then one day I started to write: that it was the eighteenth of November and that there was someone in the house. That is still the situation. I have reached this point and there is nothing more to tell. All I have to show for days and days of trying to remember my long succession of days is a pile of paper and a messy room.” But as readers of Solvej Balle’s seven-part novel, On the Calculation of Volume, know, much will be told, tested, pondered, and explored by Tara Selter, an antiquarian book dealer caught in a day that—for her, and as she comes to learn, for untold others—refuses to give way to November 19. Balle brilliantly transforms the familiar trappings of the time-loop narrative into a vehicle for defamiliarizing novelistic form and content and for reawakening, within her reader, a sense of the profound strangeness (both beautiful and terrible) of everyday life. In this two-session Novel Theory reading group, we will consider how On the Calculation of Volume represents and rethinks love, aging, language, writing, consumption, climate breakdown, and much more. The session on November 10, 2026 (6 p.m. EST), will focus on volumes 1 and 2; the session on November 18, 2026 (6 p.m. EST), will focus on volumes 3 and 4.

About the Speaker

Paul Kelleher is Associate Professor of English at Emory University and the Director of Emory’s Disability Studies Initiative. His first book, Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature appeared in 2015. He is completing his second book, Unfashioned Creatures: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century, and co-editing two volumes: one, on Jane Austen and disability; the other, on disability and the archive in early modern and eighteenth-century literary studies.

If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.