# Complicity and the Comparative Method: The Warden ![floating letters](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/mahindra/files/novel_theory.jpg?itok=wJt0X7D4) #### calendar\_today Date and Time **March 27, 2025** 06:00PM - 07:30PM EDT #### pin\_drop Location **Barker Center, Room 133** [ Register here to attend via Zoom arrow\_circle\_right ](https://wellesley.zoom.us/meeting/register/xJ3n99HiTBmZLIry86aIkw) ## [NOVEL THEORY](/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 or Yoon Sun Lee at . --- Attachments- [ picture\_as\_pdf Savage Detectives Reread.Intro\_.pdf ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/2025-01/Savage%20Detectives%20Reread.Intro_.pdf) --- See also:- [ Seminar ](/event-type/seminar) - [ Novel Theory ](/seminars/novel-theory) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://mahindrahumanities.harvard.edu/node/1618326/event-feed.ics) Copy link link