Mary A. Favret (Indiana University)
"Fields of Battle, Fields of History "

What happens when the orderliness of chronological and periodical time falters, when temporalities arise which cannot easily be measured or differentiated? In her lecture, Professor Favret traces some of the ways that the time of war disrupts the logic of dating, “the historians’ code” that underwrites the emergence of historicism in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, this lecture critiques Walter Scott’s view (borrowed from the Scottish Enlightenment and shared by subsequent practitioners) of cultural history operating on “extensive neutral ground,” by examining the battlefields required to produce that view. On the other hand, it examines more recent versions of history (by Michel Foucault and Reinhart Koselleck) which address the belligerence of historical practice.

Mary A. Favret is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Indiana. She is the author of Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge, 1993), and co-editor, with Nicola Watson, of At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist and Materialist Criticism (Indiana, 1994). Her essay, "Everyday War" was selected as the Best Essay in Romantic Studies by the Keats-Shelley Association in 2005. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and The Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College.

Andrew H. Miller (Indiana University)
"The Pathos of Being One: A Letter to My Sister"

Professor Miller’s lecture concerns an aspect of modern moral psychology, and the aesthetic, social, and historical forces that have naturalized it. That aspect, which he calls “the optative,” is essentially contrastive and counterfactual: in it, one understands whom one has become in relation to the possible, but unrealized selves one has not become. “Two roads diverged in a wood . . .” Frost’s poem is the most familiar expression of this optative self-understanding, but it is more pervasively associated with the novel; the virtuosic manipulations of perspective characteristic of the realistic novel sustained such reflection. Professor Miller will consider several novels in his attempt to make this claim plausible, but he will focus at greatest length on Anthony Trollope’s remarkable He Knew He Was Right. Trollope’s novel will serve as an occasion to think through one especially powerful factory of the period’s optative self-understanding, sibling relations.

Andrew H. Miller is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of the Victorian Studies Program at the University of Indiana. He is the author of Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative (Cambridge, 1995) and co-editor, with James Eli Adams, of Sexualities in Victorian Britain (Indiana, 1996). His book, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth Century Literature is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in May 2008. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Center for Human Values at Princeton University, the American Council of Learned Societies. Since 1991, he has served as the Editor of Victorian Studies.