Professor Amanda S. Anderson: 'The Tragic and The Ordinary'

Provost's Faculty Lecture Series #2: Building Intellectual Community
March 9, 2016
Professor Amanda S. Anderson
Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities and English
Director of the Cogut Center for the Humanities
This talk explores the distinctive ways in which literary genres and modes themselves illuminate our understanding of moral life – and it will ask how literature can reframe some of the most pressing questions at play in recent cultural debates about the motives and limits of moral deliberation, and about the nature of both cognitive and moral processes. Professor Anderson focuses in particular on the relation between tragic experience and ordinary life in the realist novel, with key examples drawn from George Eliot.