Seminar: Christine Smallwood teaches Middlemarch by George Eliot

 

There is no novel quite like Middlemarch. This book has it all: bad marriages, thwarted ambition, professional failure, gambling, debt, death, electoral politics, and the rise of the railroad. It is so many books woven together into one: a realist novel of marriage, career, politics, and social change; a historical appraisal of the recent past; a philosophical exploration of consciousness; an ethical treatise on the meaning of interdependence. As Eliot’s narrator says, in one of her famous addresses to the reader, “Any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour.” Such convergences are only one of the many pleasures of Middlemarch. Our discussions in this seminar will be wide-ranging, but we will pay special attention to how Eliot imagines change—both social and personal—and how she portrays consciousness, particularly as it relates to intention, decision, action, and spiritual vocation.