Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Knowing George Eliot : A Roundtable of Scholars and Ideas

Date and Time
November 14, 2014

Location

Event Details

George Eliot: Ethicist. Philosopher. Therapist?  From Virginia Woolf’s pronouncement that Middlemarch is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people” to Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, the author George Eliot has staked a uniquely intimate claim in the lives of her readers, as if she understood the human condition better, more carefully, and more sympathetically than anyone else.  And yet, as Leslie Stephen once remarked of Middlemarch, Eliot’s work ultimately leaves an impression of pain—of the unfulfillment, injury, and remorse in the “blundering lives” of her characters.  This roundtable will consider the unsettling combination of compassion, vulnerability, and knowledge that describes the realm of her fiction, as well as readers’ enduring relationship to it and to its creator.

Nicholas Dames is the Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he specializes in theories of fiction, histories of reading, and the nineteenth-century novel.  He is the author of Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810-1870 and The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction.

David Kurnick is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, where he teaches nineteenth-century literature and the history of the novel.  He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2012).  His translation of Julio Cortázar’s 1975 novel Fantomas versus the Multinational Vampires was published this summer. 

Deborah Nord is Professor of English at Princeton University, where she teaches mainly Victorian literature and culture.  She is the author of The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb; Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City; and Gypsies and the British Imagination, 1807-1930.  She also edited John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (Yale University Press, 2002).

Wendy Anne Lee is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at New York University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature.  Her book-in-progress about the relationship between the emergence of the psychological novel and Enlightenment philosophies of emotions is called Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel