Steelcase Faculty Fellow
About
"Novel Meanings: Fiction and the Rise of Meaningfulness"
No one talked about “meaning” in an existential sense—as in “the meaning of life”—until the nineteenth century. My book-in-progress traces the surprisingly recent rise of “meaning-talk” and, along with it, the emergence of “meaning” as a distinct value. I do so with particular attention to the genre of the novel, which plays a privileged role in this development. I ask how the rise of meaning and meaningfulness complicates the classic understanding of secular modernity as the age of disenchantment, and how it complicates classic accounts of the novel that rely on this understanding. I focus in particular on novels from the nineteenth century to the present day that explore what happens when we apply—or, alternately, resist applying—the meaning-making logic and techniques of fiction to real life.
Daniel Hack is Professor of English Language and Literature.
