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The is proud to host a discussion with  (Department of English, èצӰ��) on "The Novel as Practice of Consciousness" Locke and Defoe, Revisited

Professor Yu is an Assistant Professor of English at èצӰ��. Her field of study ranges across the poetry and prose of the early modern period through the eighteenth century, focusing particularly on the history of the emotions, popular politics, and traditions of religious dissent. An early publication of hers dealt with John Milton’s formative influence on fundamental principles of literary criticism. A more recent article in Representations illuminates a neglected early modern conception of the “tender conscience,” from which she derives a new account of the English Civil War and Milton’s career as a whole. Her current project, Experiencing the Novel: The Genre of Tender Conscience, builds on this work, arguing that a seismic shift in perceptions of sensitivity reshaped the political realm and gave to literary history the modern aesthetic form.

The present essay, "The Novel as Practice of Consciousness," proposes a reading of the novel’s continuous prose as narrative exertion—as an effortful activity embedded in practitioners’ temporally extended doings. It treats the novel in other words as a practice, where “practice” is defined apart from theoretical abstraction as the concept-rich site of iterative and often tacitly knowledgeable action. The recurrence of one effortful action across early eighteenth-century fiction—first-person prose narration—invites particular attention as a practice thus defined. The present study traces this enduring literary practice to early modern England’s embrace of life-writing: continual, regimen-based acts of writing were widely enjoined across the seventeenth century as the routine care of the conscience. The early novel draws on these first-person practices of the conscience to cultivate a related realm, the domain of consciousness then receiving explicit philosophical definition. Defoe’s prose fiction holds together what this essay shows to be a conscience-consciousness matrix. The early novel proves a first-person practice suited to empiricism’s socially-diffuse ethical dilemmas, from the tabula rasa state to large-scale projects of human quantification.