HRC Events Calendar

Faculty of Arts colleagues and students are warmly invited to come along to a forthcoming Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies research seminar. The research seminar will take place in the Student Hub (FAB5.49). Drinks and nibbles are provided.

Wednesday 3 December, 4pm, FAB5.49:

Causation in The Mill on the Floss

Dr Andrea Selleri  

George Eliot’s second novel was published in 1860, at a time when the author was intensely engaged with the relationship between abstract theoretical topics and people’s everyday lives. In this talk I aim to draw attention to one philosophical problem with which Eliot seems to have been especially preoccupied while writing this novel, and whose influence can be seen both at the macroscopic level of plot and at the local levels of characterisation and narratorial commentary. The problem in question is that of causation, and its novelistic corollary is the question of how it operates in people’s lives. Of course, at some level, any story must engage with causation, in the sense of presupposing some logic for the events of its plot; but in The Mill on the Floss, I will argue, there is a quasi-systematic attempt on Eliot’s part to transcend the classic novelistic paradigm of “motivation” and replace it with a more capacious set of considerations about how people’s conscious reasons for their actions are embedded in a complex tissue of supra-personal factors. These include historical and economic considerations, but also an element of randomness. By situating Eliot’s engagement with causation within a seldom considered British nineteenth-century philosophical tradition concerned with the free will vs. determinism debate, and in particular by considering the influence of philosopher Charles Bray’s “incompatibilism”, I hope to provide a rationale for some of the features of Eliot’s novel, e.g. the oft-noticed oddity of its ending.

Dr Andrea Selleri has worked in the Department of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University in Ankara, and at the University of Warwick, where he completed his PhD in 2014. His research is mostly concerned with the relations between Victorian literature, criticism and philosophy. His work has appeared in the Review of English Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, English Literary History, Philosophy and Literature, and Notes and Queries. He is the editor of the third volume of the Routledge series Literature and Philosophy in Nineteenth-Century British Culture.

Best wishes,

Dr Steve Purcell

Director of Research, English and Comparative Literary Studies