Department of English

• Friday, April 18, 2025 - 11:00am to 1:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge (room 135)

On Friday, April 18, Molly Young will defend her dissertation "Desiring the Everyday in Victorian Literature." Molly writes:

"How we spend our days, Annie Dillard writes, is how we spend our lives. Dillard’s remark invites us to think of the everyday as a source of enduring meaning. 'Desiring the Everyday in Victorian Literature' analyzes the urge to do just this: to turn to the everyday as a neglected site of self-awareness and human fellowship. This urge has proven especially powerful in the face of our intensely mediated information age. To turn to one’s everyday life amidst such conditions is, one hopes, to clear the ground of their attendant distractions and achieve greater epistemological and ethical clarity. It's an attractive and abiding proposition, the historical roots of which lie in the secularizing nineteenth-century, at the dawn of a different, but not entirely dissimilar, media explosion. But conceiving of the everyday as the measure of meaningfulness makes only more evident its limits—and our limits within it. (Indeed, Dillard's comment is as much a clarion call to attend to such meaning as it is a warning of its potential absence.) As a site of repetitive, ordinary, often isolating experience, unmarked by heroic behavior or profound change, the passage of day after day can be painfully circumscribing, a diurnal reminder of how contained and finite the self truly is. The considerable literature on everyday life has paid little attention to this fraught idealization of the everyday as an object of pervasive desire; and yet, it textures our daily experience and our most cherished narratives, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. To study this desire, I attend to the Victorian writing of John Henry Newman, John Ruskin, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot as they articulated the first great urge to redeem the everyday from the tides of distraction and information overload, secularization and the constant flux of history, with equal parts skepticism and shame, didacticism and withdrawal. In our vexed encounters with these four writers, I suggest, we might come to understand our own desire for the everyday anew, in all its strange vitality, as a pervasive-yet-elusive condition of everyday life now."

The defense will take place in the Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge (room 135). The private portion of the defense will take place from 11 to 12 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 12 to 1 pm, to be followed by a celebratory reception.

We hope to see you there as we congratulate Molly on this wonderful achievement!