Lundi 30 janvier 2023, 17h-19h, (salle de colloque , bâtiment multimédia). Séance suivie d’un apéritif convivial).
“Deux heures en compagnie de….” avec Professor Julia Kuehn (Hong Kong University) : “George Eliot: more than a Novelist” A lot can be, and has been, said about George Eliot (pen name for Marian Evans). She is certainly one of the best-known novelists of nineteenth-century Britain: in 2015, and after an international poll of book critics, the BBC declared her novel Middlemarch (1871-2) ‘the best British novel of all time’. Critics celebrate her for literary realism, for the psychological depth of her characters and the portrayal of provincial life in front of the backdrop of a changing England. This is all true, and this session will look at some of her writings up close. But there is even more to her: she translated (from the German) Strauss’s Life of Jesus and Feuerbach’s Essence of Christendom, which were vastly controversial at the time as they denied Jesus’s divine nature and/or saw humans and human consciousness, and not God, at the centre and origin of religion. She was a journalist who reviewed book from various disciplines (history, philosophy, literature) and, in doing so, engaged with the important questions of the day: liberalism and women’s rights, democracy, colonialism, religion, tradition and progress. And, of course, she lived openly, and without a marriage certificate, with philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes. George Eliot is a woman of many facets and for many disciplines – and much more than the writer of ‘big, epically long, boring books’, as which Boris Johnson described her in a 2007 article in Easy Living magazine…