The First-Person Novel: Between Formal Realism and Moral Realism • Esther Yu (Stanford University)

About this event

Please join us for "The First-Person Novel: Between Formal Realism and Moral Realism," a talk with Esther Yu (Stanford University) on Tuesday, November 10, at 5:00 pm in the Barker Room. In one of those critical truisms more often acknowledged than examined, the first-person narrator-character rises alongside the English novel. Taking Samuel Richardson's Pamela as its case study, this talk charts, through two competing categories of realism, an alternate genealogy for these novelistic persons. The first person entered English prose fiction as a deliberate provocation, one that challenges both an earlier hermeneutics of suspicion and modern notions of possessive individualism. The novel's subject registers in its sensitive form the seventeenth-century tremors of mass upheaval-long-range agitations that in Richardson's time still called for a collective practice of literature extending far past fictional bounds. About the speakerEsther Yu is assistant professor of English at Stanford University. Her recent work, which ranges across the poetry and prose of the early modern period through the eighteenth century, can be found in PMLA and Critical Inquiry. A first book, "Experiencing the Novel: The Genre of Tender Conscience," is forthcoming this December from the University of Chicago Press. About the seriesLiterary Studies Today is a series addressing the need for literature, literary studies, and criticism for understanding our world. Co-hosted by the Departments of English and Comparative Literature, speakers and panels will address the singular ways in which literature and criticism can grasp the complexities, challenges, and contemporary convulsions of our present and future.erson Novel: Between Formal Realism and Moral Realism," a talk with Esther Yu (Stanford University) on Tuesday, November 10, at 5:00 pm in the Barker Room.

In one of those critical truisms mor e often acknowledged than examined, the first-person narrator-character rises alongside the English novel. Taking Samuel Richardson's

Pamela

as its case study, this talk charts, through two competing categories of realism, an alternate genealogy for these novelistic persons. The first person entered English prose fiction as a deliberate provocation, one that challenges both an earlier hermeneutics of suspicion and modern notions of possessive individualism. The novel's subject registers in its sensitive form the seventeenth-century tremors of mass upheaval-long-range agitations that in Richardson's time still called for a collective practice of literature extending far past fictional bounds.

About the speaker

Esther Yu

is assistant professor of English at Stanford University. Her recent work, which ranges across the poetry and prose of the early modern period through the eighteenth century, can be found in

PMLA

and

Critical Inquiry. A first book, "Experiencing the Novel: The Genre of Tender Conscience," is forthcoming this December from the University of Chicago Press.

About the series

Literary Studies Today

is a series addressing the need for literature, literary studies, and criticism for understanding our world. Co-hosted by the Departments of English and Comparative Literature, speakers and panels will address the singular ways in which literature and criticism can grasp the complexities, challenges, and contemporary convulsions of our present and future.