Fiction/Addiction

Catalog description

In eighteenth-century Britain, the rise of global mercantile capitalism coincided with the novel’s consolidation as a cultural form. Each in its own way poses questions about habit and volition: do we control what we consume, or does what we consume control us? This course explores aspects of narrative form and character representation in the early English novel with relation to the cultural history of addiction. To anchor our approach to 18th-century fiction (Defoe, Haywood, Lennox, Burney, Edgeworth), we will investigate discussions of appetite, reason, motivation, and compulsion in philosophy and critical theory (Plato, Locke, Johnson, Foucault, Derrida, Sedgwick, Gallagher).