Samantha Sommers, affiliated with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, will be giving a talk entitled “Revelations of Reading in Wieland; or, the Transformation” on Monday, February 12th, 16.40-18.00, in room G-160. The talk is sponsored by the Department of American Culture and Literature. All members of the Bilkent community are invited to attend.
The abstract of the talk is as follows:
“Revelations of Reading in Wieland; or, the Transformation”
While the experience of reading Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) is one that refuses closure and capitalizes on ambiguity, within the novel reading is frequently depicted as a process by which a text takes hold of, registers in, and moves through the feeling body of a reader. The novel sets an opposition between the immediate, revelatory capacity of reading and the vagaries of voice to theorize reading as a process with that activates the senses, resolves uncertainty, and produces physiological reactions in response to revelations of truth.