This seminar will provide extensive attention to Henry James's last completed novels: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Widely regarded as the masterpieces of James's final period, these novels have also become important to discussions of modernism and modernity, the form of narrative prose fiction and the forms of human perception and cognition. We will also read the collection of prefaces he wrote for the New York Edition of his works, and we will read The American Scene. We'll engage a considerable body of critical work on James, arguments that assume different perspectives: narratological, phenomenological, historicist, deconstructive, ethical, &c. Participants will be asked to provide oral and written accounts of both critical texts and textual moments in the novels, and they will be asked to share their proposals for the final paper.