Presented By: Sessions @ Michigan
Public Lecture -- "How We Imagine Victorian Readers," Debra Gettelman (College of the Holy Cross)
The Nineteenth-Century Forum (NCF) invites you to the following public lecture,
“How We Imagine Victorian Readers”with guest speaker Debra Gettelman (College of the Holy Cross)Thursday, March 20th6:00-7:30 PMLocation: 3330 Mason HallOr via Zoom
Please contact Alexa Kelly (avkelly@umich.edu) or Torre Puckett (puckettt@umich.edu) with any questions.
Abstract: The novel reader’s independent imagination has long gotten a bad rap. Eighteenth-century critics saw potential for moral danger in how novels stimulate a mix of reading, inventing, and daydreaming. Early twentieth-century academics established the discipline of literary studies by excluding readers’ free associations from both criticism and the classroom. Literary studies still lacks productive models for the unscripted work the novel reader’s imagination does when it is, inevitably, imagining things other than the words on the page.
And yet, counterintuitively, highly descriptive and directive Victorian novels offer a model of inviting and grappling with the reader’s imaginative additions to the fictional world. Novelists from Jane Austen to George Eliot use syntax and prose style to stimulate readerly imagining to go beyond the author’s description at every level, from plot outcomes to character descriptions. Especially Eliot: Middlemarch uses negation to make readers’ minds move flexibly between what belongs and does not belong to the fictional world. Daniel Deronda uses “we,” “us,” and “our” to coax readers into more inclusive versions of human fellowship. Revisiting Eliot’s extensive use of the first-person plural throughout her career reveals her deep understanding—still little acknowledged in literary studies—of how author and reader together construct the fictional world.
Debra Gettelman is Associate Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, where she is also Dean of the Class of 2027. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews as well as Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
“How We Imagine Victorian Readers”with guest speaker Debra Gettelman (College of the Holy Cross)Thursday, March 20th6:00-7:30 PMLocation: 3330 Mason HallOr via Zoom
Please contact Alexa Kelly (avkelly@umich.edu) or Torre Puckett (puckettt@umich.edu) with any questions.
Abstract: The novel reader’s independent imagination has long gotten a bad rap. Eighteenth-century critics saw potential for moral danger in how novels stimulate a mix of reading, inventing, and daydreaming. Early twentieth-century academics established the discipline of literary studies by excluding readers’ free associations from both criticism and the classroom. Literary studies still lacks productive models for the unscripted work the novel reader’s imagination does when it is, inevitably, imagining things other than the words on the page.
And yet, counterintuitively, highly descriptive and directive Victorian novels offer a model of inviting and grappling with the reader’s imaginative additions to the fictional world. Novelists from Jane Austen to George Eliot use syntax and prose style to stimulate readerly imagining to go beyond the author’s description at every level, from plot outcomes to character descriptions. Especially Eliot: Middlemarch uses negation to make readers’ minds move flexibly between what belongs and does not belong to the fictional world. Daniel Deronda uses “we,” “us,” and “our” to coax readers into more inclusive versions of human fellowship. Revisiting Eliot’s extensive use of the first-person plural throughout her career reveals her deep understanding—still little acknowledged in literary studies—of how author and reader together construct the fictional world.
Debra Gettelman is Associate Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross, where she is also Dean of the Class of 2027. She is the author of numerous articles and reviews as well as Imagining Otherwise: How Readers Help to Write Nineteenth-Century Novels, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
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