Prof. Mike Hill: Realism and the Novel I: Enlightenment Origins

Date: November 27, 2019 – Wednesday

Time: 13:30-15:30 P.M.

Venue: Room 504, Building 6, Hongkou Campus

Language: English

Summary:

This seminar will discuss the origins of the English novel in the eighteenth century, focusing specifically on the relationship between genre and realism. We will be interested in defining key features of the form as it emerged alongside other important social and political developments: bourgeois social organization, capitalism, and empire. More importantly, our goal will be to explain the role that genre plays in Western theories about how human beings understand and experience the world. As part of the period known as the Enlightenment, philosophy, or what was simply called “science,” seeks to distance itself from religious and other forms of epistemic orthodoxy. By turning to empiricism, knowledge proposes to affirm—as Francis Bacon says—the world “as it really is.” The English novel, too, began by advancing the same proposition: to depict reality as it is, and embrace our common experience of “the real”. By proposing to include any human being capable of rational thought, eighteenth-century realist fiction became the West’s first popular literary form. The novel gave writing the unprecedented status of being part of mass culture, just as it sought to depict scenes taken from what Jurgen Habermas calls the “public sphere.” But in fact, as Habermas also says, the “public” was comprised of far fewer people than the term “human” would idealistically imply. The laboring majority (e.g. peasants, women, and slaves) were regarded as the “multitude” or the “masses,” and not part of “the public sphere.” How does this social contradiction illuminate a philosophical (and technical) problem that runs along the same lines? What about the relationship between massiveness and reality as an Enlightenment “scientific” problem, one that is dependent on what kind of media tools we use designate “the real”? Our goal will be to show how the novel represents the “the real” as a problem of enlargement, and how—recalling Adam Smith—fiction is used in the eighteenth-century to help us sort, sequence, and classify reality at its full and often overwhelming scale.

Speaker Biography:

Professor Michael Hill (initial Mike Hill) at the state university of New York at Albany, English department is engaged in British and American literature and culture study of senior scholars, published "another Adam Smith: business society, public protests and the birth of new economics" "mass, class, and the public domain" analytical most of America's "white:" and so on.Among them, the other Adam Smith, which was released in Chinese in 2018, is a critical reflection on the enlightenment thinker Adam Smith, and an analysis of the reasons why Adam Smith's work still occupies an important position in the theoretical debate in the 21st century, and involves the interpretation of Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche.