Date:
Location:
VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE
SPEAKER: Ronjaunee Chatterjee, Queens University, Canada
This talk links together three unlikely figures—George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and W.E.B Du Bois—to develop a theory of what I am calling diagrammatic realism. Jumpstarted by Edouard Glissant’s claims for the “thought of opacity,” I read in all three thinkers’ interest in realism, conceived broadly, a concurrent pull away from realism’s alleged investments in representational fidelity. Building off a definition of the "diagrammatic" drawn from visual art, and especially, the work of Gilles Deleuze on the painter Francis Bacon, I explore how non-figural and abstract elements of Eliot, Hardy, and Du Bois' work shift realism's relationship to the utopian.
About the Speaker
Ronjaunee Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of English at Queens University, Canada. She is the author of Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford University Press, 2022) and the editor of George Eliot's Middlemarch (A Norton Critical Edition, January 2024). She has also co-edited a special issue of Victorian Studies (with Alicia Mireles Christoff and Amy R. Wong, 2020) and cowritten an introductory essay, "Undisciplining Victorian Studies," which won the NAVSA Donald Gray Prize for Best Essay in Victorian Studies.