时 间：2019年11月28日（周四）下午2:30-4:30

地 点：外语学院外国文学与文化研究所（3楼3054室）

讲座题目：Fiction and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Britain

主 讲 人：Dr.Roger Maioli

主办单位：武汉大学外语学院外国文学与文化研究所

讲座对象：外院文学方向教师及研究生

摘 要：

Can works of fiction communicate knowledge about the real world? Defenders of poetry from Aristotle to the Renaissance had long thought so; but the rise of British empiricism in the seventeenth century called their views into question. In Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel: Fielding to Austen, Roger Maioli reconstitutes the empiricist challenge to the novel, showing that philosophers from Francis Bacon to David Hume viewed fiction as a source not of knowledge, but of misconceptions about empirical reality. In this talk he will develop this argument, showing that empiricism changed the debate about literature and knowledge in irreversible ways: as novelists from Henry Fielding to Jane Austen sought to rehabilitate fiction in the eyes of empiricism, they inaugurated a longstanding tradition in Western aesthetics, one that endeavors to defend literature from resilient forms of empirical skepticism.

讲座人简介：

Dr.Roger Maioli毕业于约翰霍 ● 普金斯大学，2016年开始在佛罗里达大学英语系任教，主讲 “Secularism and Its Discontents，” “Versions of Enlightenment，” “Rethinking the Rise of the Novel”等研究生课程。曾应邀在斯坦福大学和哈佛大学做关于英国小说研究的讲座，发表 “Empiricism and Henry Fielding’s Theory of Fiction,”（Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 27, 2, Winter 2014-15）和 “David Hume, Literary Cognitivism, and the Truth of the Novel,”（SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 54, 3, Summer 2014）等高水平论文，其专著Empiricism and the Early Theory of the Novel: Fielding to Austen于2016年由Palgrave Macmillan出版社出版。此次分享的是其专著中的主要观点。