Daniel Hack, "Finding Echoes: Ishiguro, Eliot, and Meaningfulness" (with a response by Kevin Ohi)
Date and Time
Location
NOVEL THEORY
SPEAKER: Daniel Hack, University of Michigan
Respondent: Kevin Ohi, Boston College
About the Speakers
Daniel Hack’s work explores the situatedness and mobility of literary texts and tropes, from the significance of a text’s original publication format to the poetics and politics of transnational circulation and cross-racial repurposing. He is the author of two books: The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (University of Virginia Press, 2005), which shows how Victorian novelists sought to turn their work’s potentially troubling implication in the material world into a source of literary value and cultural authority; and Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (Princeton University Press, 2017), which reveals the scope and importance of African American writers’ and editors’ engagements with contemporary British literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His current project analyzes the rise of meaningfulness as a central aesthetic, ethical, and affective value in modern life, focusing in particular on the role of the novel in both modeling and critiquing the application of the meaning-making logic of fiction to lived experience. He is also editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture.
Kevin Ohi specializes in queer theory, aestheticism and decadence, late-Victorian prose and fiction, film, literary theory, and the history of the novel in England, Ireland and America. His most recent book is Inceptions: Literary Beginnings and the Contingencies of Form (Fordham UP, 2021). Professor Ohi's current projects focus on narrative perspective and desire in twentieth-century novels and on unrequited love.
Pre-circulated paper attached below. Please register for the password.