Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar: Katherine Brandt, English “Addictive Practices: Realism and Substance Use in the Nineteenth-Century Novel”
March 18, 2025
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileIn “Addictive Practices: Realism and Substance Use in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” Katherine Brandt analyzes representations and manifestations of intoxication and addiction as they pertain to the nineteenth-century realist novel, and more broadly, how addiction itself can be a theoretical foundation for better understanding the development, conventions, and formal technologies of the novel as the conception of addiction emerged during this time. The writers on which Brandt focuses this study utilize both poles of the disease/dis-ease paradigm to link both the phenomenological experience of addiction and consciousness and physiology of their characters to their novels’ investment in realism. Her examination of addiction in the nineteenth-century novel investigates cultural perspectives of the milieu regarding addiction, how they became a defining characteristic of novelistic realism, and how novels, particularly those of the Victorian era, engender and elicit their own addictive practices, both in the experience of the reader and in the work of the novelists themselves.
Date posted
Aug 30, 2024
Date updated
Aug 30, 2024