End Date :
Heyman Center Common Room + Zoom
The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities
Barnard English Department
The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious
by Nathan Gorelick
Unveiling the fantasies that drove the Enlightenment and created modern literature
Nathan Gorelick’s The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature between Ideology and the Unconscious traces the relations between literary criticism and psychoanalysis to their shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and novelistic discourse, where the period’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism are most apparent. Gorelick shows how modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to these efforts and by an ethical concern for what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. Troubling the idea of the Enlightenment on its own terms, subverting its supposed authority from within, Gorelick thus reveals the workings of unconscious fantasy at the foundations of our contemporary political realities. The Unwritten Enlightenment makes clear that to criticize the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.
About the Author
Nathan Gorelick teaches in the English Department and for the First-Year Experience program at Barnard College. His areas of expertise include British and Continental Literature from the Restoration through Romanticism, Enlightenment philosophy and ideology, literary theory, and psychoanalysis. Before joining the faculty at Barnard, he was Associate Professor of English at Utah Valley University. His work has appeared in numerous journals of literary theory and Continental philosophy, including CR: The New Centennial Review, Continental Thought and Theory, Discourse, Parapraxis, Psychoanalytic Review, and Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious. He is also an analyst in formation and Candidate in the Post-Graduate Certificate Program in Psychoanalysis at the Pulsion Institute in New York.
About the Speakers
Joseph Albernaz, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, specializes in the literature, especially poetry, of the Romantic period, with a particular interest in the legacies of Romanticism across a number of theoretical and critical domains. His first book, Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community (Stanford University Press, 2024), reads writers from Geneva to Jamaica to trace new formations of community, ecology, and the every day in Romantic literature and its later inheritors.
Ross Hamilton is the English Department Chair and Professor of English at Barnard College. He specializes in metahistorical patterns from the Reformation to Romanticism, as well as the shift from natural philosophy to early modern science. He is also interested in the Annales historians and their influence. His first book, Accident: A Literary and Philosophical History (University of Chicago Press, 2008), traces the transformations and mutations of Aristotle’s notion of the accidental or inessential from Sophocles to late 20th century film. A second book, Falling: Literature, Science and Social Change, explores literary analogues to the paradigm shift from natural philosophy to early modern science described by Thomas Kuhn, among others.
Azeen A. Khan is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and a licensed psychoanalyst with a clinical practice in New York City. She specializes in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, postcolonial literatures and theory, and feminist and critical thought. Her book, The Subaltern Clinic, considers the relation between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and postcolonial theory, focusing on the writings of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, and Jacques Lacan.
Adele Tutter is a practicing psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Columbia University. She is the author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House (forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press) and coeditor of Grief and its Transcendence: Creativity, Memory, and Identity (Routledge). She is currently working on a second monograph, Mourning and Metamorphosis: Poussin’s Ovidian Vision.
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