Centers of Consciousness: Protagonism and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel
602 Philosophy Hall Mail Code 4927 1150 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027
Sharon Marcus, Nicholas Dames, James Eli Adams
Since Aristotle’s _Poetics_, we have categorized characters in terms of relative quantity and proportion – major and minor; round and flat. My dissertation counters such scaled taxonomies by proposing a form of characterization called _protagonism_. In readings of major nineteenth-century realist novels, I show how small amounts of texts yield the kind of descriptive abundance we normally associate with copious amounts of exposition, as formal narrative techniques produce richly compact portraits of otherwise ancillary figures. Protagonism thereby recovers a version of Victorian realism’s moral impulse toward sympathetic extension in which eloquent yet concentrated renderings of interiority translate individual difference into an often egalitarian language of social recognition.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York, New York Instructor, School of Continuing Education, Summer Term 2010 “Fiends, Felons, and Outcasts: Misfit Individuality in Nineteenth-Century British Literature” Instructor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Fall Term 2009 “University Writing” Teaching Assistant – Department of English and Comparative Literature “History of the English Novel II,” Professor Sharon Marcus, Spring Term, 2009. “James Joyce,” Professor Philip Kitcher, Fall Term, 2008. “The Victorian Novel,” Professor Nicholas Dames, Fall Term, 2007. Teaching Assistant – Department of History “British History After 1867,” Professor Susan Pedersen, Spring Term, 2010. “British History 1760-1867,” Professor Emma Winter, Spring Term, 2008. UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Chicago, Illinois Teaching Assistant “Media Aesthetics” Core Sequence, Fall, Winter, and Spring quarters, 2004-2005.
“‘The first ray of light’: Introductions and Interpolations in The Pickwick Papers.” Panel sponsored by The Dickens Project. Modern Language Association Convention, Seattle, WA, January 2012 (forthcoming) “A Self-Made Man: Performing Character in Collins’s The Woman in White” North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Nashville, TN, November 2011 (forthcoming) “Frankenstein; or, the Modern Protagonist” International Conference on Narrative, St. Louis, MO, April 2011 “Why Always Lucy?: Putting Villette’s Protagonist Into Perspective” North American Victorian Studies Association Conference, Montreal, Canada, November 2010 “Telling Against Terror: The Narration of Sympathy in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” Midwest Modern Language Association Conference, Chicago, IL, November 2010 “Hospitable Exchanges in Gaskell’s Cranford and the Great Exhibition” Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Boston, MA, February 2008 “Progress, Narrative, and Nation in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda” Fordham University Graduate English Association Conference, New York, NY, October 2008
Sarah G. Lubin Fellowship. Columbia University, 2010-2011 Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Summer Teaching Scholars Course Design Award, Columbia University, 2010 Mellon Summer Research Fellowship, Columbia University, 2007, 2011 Marjorie Hope Nicolson Doctoral Fellowship, Columbia University, 2006-2009