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

 



    ![floating letters](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/mahindra/files/novel_theory.jpg?itok=wJt0X7D4) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 18, 2026** 

 06:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Online**  



 

 [ Register Here arrow\_circle\_right ](https://harvard.zoom.us/meeting/register/w2eKU7nPTiKTVDhdsX5xCg) 

 



 

## [NOVEL THEORY](/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>.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar)
- [ Novel Theory ](/seminars/novel-theory)
 
 

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