Complicity and the Comparative Method: The Warden
Date and Time
Location
NOVEL THEORY
SPEAKER: Ayelet Ben-Yishai, University of Haifa
In the political nightmare that many of us inhabit, complicity – the condition of being “folded into” (and thus variously responsible for) injustice, injury or otherwise undesirable outcomes – has resurfaced as a one of the thorniest ethical and political concerns of our times. While scholarship to date has largely focused on the ethics of the complicit or implicated subject, I turn to realist fiction to learn how to read complicit situations formally. At the center of this talk is Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1855), which shares with its Victorian counterparts a concern with the possibilities of acting ethically in a corrupt society, returning repeatedly to situations of complicity in order to stage the human inability to inhabit the realms of the unambiguously good. The novel’s realism, I argue, is indebted to a communal and complicit epistemology, a mode of knowing that is always entangled in social structures and thus offers a “thick description” of the ways in which complicity mediates individuals, institutions, locations, and actions. The intractability of complicity, I hope to show, is in fact its epistemological strength, precisely because it allows us to account for that which we cannot will away.
About the Speaker
Ayelet Ben-Yishai teaches postcolonial and Victorian literature at the English Department at the University of Haifa, where she specializes in the history and theory of the novel, with particular focus on questions of realism, genre, and literary epistemology. A comparatist by training, she has written extensively on the intersection of law and literature, especially in Common Precedents (Oxford, 2013). More recently Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English (Oxford 2023), conceptualizes new ways of imagining the relationship between politics, history, and genre. Her teaching, research, and way of being in the world often overlap, prompting her new project on the political and discursive problems and affordances of complicity.
This is a hybrid event. Please register here to attend via Zoom.
If you have any questions, please contact Deidre Lynch at deidrelynch@fas.harvard.edu or Yoon Sun Lee at ylee@wellesley.edu.