Moments of Vocation

Moments of Vocation
Virtual Panel

October 28, 2024
1pm PDT | 4pm EDT | 8pm GMT | 7am AEDT (10/29)

What does it mean to make up one’s mind, to undergo a change of heart, or to experience “a moment of vocation”?

Such a moment occurs early in Middlemarch, when an encyclopedia fortuitously falls open to a diagram of the heart before the eyes of a startled Tertius Lydgate, aged 10. This “moment of vocation,” Eliot writes, makes his whole world seem “new”—and, for the reader, it presages the tangled professional and romantic trajectories that her novel will go on to narrate for Tertius over its remaining pages.

Instances of insight, conversion, or course-correction  are frequent turning points in the plots of nineteenth-century novels— though such moments, often transformative and world-making, become legible or narratable as “events” only in retrospect. This panel brings together five papers that each direct attention to a distinct narrative or professional “vocational event,” exploring topics in nineteenth-century pedagogy, psychology, the science of character, disciplinary formation and the rise of the professions in relation to questions of theories of the novel, narration, and literary form.

Speakers

Olivia Xu (Northwestern University)
“‘Their Immortals Are Not Ours’: Chinese Misreading of Tess.”

Alexis Ferguson (Princeton University)
“‘[Transformed] into what I abhorred!’: Race, Desire, and Manhood in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor”

Muriel Bernardi (University of Pennsylvania)
“Losing the Soul: Forms of Materiality in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss”

Jonathan Dick (University of Pennsylvania)
“The Ruskin Colony”

Hannah LeClair (University of Pennsylvania)
“‘Cures for despair’: Hardy and Literary Autodidacticism”