The Department of English Language and Literature invites you to a public talk for the Humanities Work in Progress Seminar Series, by Dr. Ayşe Çelikkol (ELIT).
Thursday, October 31, 5:30 pm, Room: A130
Title: “Abstraction and Landscape Fertility from David Ricardo to William Cobbett”
Abstract: This talk will discuss the abstract character of land in the political economist David Ricardo’s theory of rent and the technique of enumeration in landscape descriptions by the journalist, reformist, and farmer William Cobbett. In the early decades of the nineteenth century when Ricardo and Cobbett were writing, farming was becoming increasingly market-oriented in England. The new order threatened the sense of material embeddedness that crop and animal husbandry had traditionally provided. While David Ricardo’s theory of rent suited capitalism’s penchant for abstractions, Cobbett highlighted the irreducible particularity of the landscape in his travelogue Rural Rides. As we will see, this counter move was as antithetical to the abstracting tendencies of the literary and artistic picturesque as it was to the theory of rent.
Biographical Note: Ayşe Çelikkol is associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature. She is the author of Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century (Oxford U P, 2011). The talk is part of a larger project on capitalist agriculture and nineteenth-century British literature.