Prof. Mike Hill: Realism and the Novel II: Ecological Mutations

Date: November 28, 2019 – Thursday

Time: 13:30-15:30 P.M.

Venue: Room 504, Building 6, Hongkou Campus

Language: English

Summary:

In an age where writing and the old technology of print has been all but displaced by computers and screens, this seminar will ask: what happens to realism and the novel in the contemporary context? New developments in Digital Humanities promise to widen the scale of how we understand the novel, changing our definition not only of what the novel is but also our notions of where it comes from and when. In Franco Moretti’s work with large data sets and algorithmic “surface reading,” for example, the restricted list of Western canonical literature is displaced. Broader arrays of novels are enumerated in a way that is more massive—and worldlier—than ever. But here again (recalling Bacon) we must ask a question about media, scale, and the real world: How is “the real” expanded and therefore reconstructed as we move between the new technology and the old? If the early modern novel made its claim for realism by enlarging what fiction is and what it does, then might we think about a new realism that goes further than the earlier one with the same agenda of reality expansion? This question introduces a new prospect for the novel, exceeding one of its original touchstones: the veracity of human experience, and even the ontological primacy of the human being per se. Contemporary examples of what we might call eco-realism seek to foster new relationships between reality and human experience. By exploring what Bruno Latour calls a “democracy of things,” contemporary writers such as Octavia Butler, Richard Powers, and Amitav Gosh present examples of the realist novel where “the real” is not reducible to anthropomorphic scales, categories, or time lines. However, rather than seeing this development as a break from early modern fiction, we will consider eco-realism as the opportunity to discover a worldlier history of literature, a future of and for the novel that was already part of its past.

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.