This class focuses on the remarkable affordance of writing known as free indirect style, which occurs when deixis comes unstuck from enunciation and narration shifts its referential center from the situation of utterance (the norm for spoken language) to the coordinates of a focalized entity. We will become expert in the analysis of free indirect style by investigating two of its important and sustained deployments in English prose. One is paradigmatic: Jane Austen’s Emma, published in 1815. The second, rather less so: the Book of Margery Kempe, completed in 1438. The aims of the course are twofold. First, we will learn to describe, analyze, and interpret free indirect style by reading scholarship by linguists, philosophers, narratologists, and literary critics and by testing these ideas with analyses of our own. Readings include Benveniste, Jakobson, Fillmore, Goffman, Bakhtin, Hamburger, Genette, Banfield, Bal, Fludernik, Margolin, Cohn, Ferguson, and numerous scholars of Austen. Second, we will experiment with how to interpret the historicity of free indirect style by considering a much earlier example of what is debatably the same technique, in the Book of Margery Kempe. We will continue our close textual analyses, while turning our attention squarely to questions of historicization. Theoretical queries into authorship, gender, other minds, the interface of orality and writing, and the periodization of literary history run throughout the course.