Victorian Visual Imagination

Congratulations to Dr. Laurie Camp Hatch, whose paper on the Victorian novelist, George Eliot, was accepted for presentation at the 2012 West Regional Conference on Christianity and Literature!  Dr. Hatch also won a Conference Travel Grant from the Faculty Development Committee.  Seattle Pacific University will host this year’s regional conference. 

A synopsis of Dr. Hatch’s scholarly inquiry:

In this essay, I will argue that George Eliot insists upon a scientific observation of the mind; her morality finds that understanding another, in particular, another’s mind is essential to establishing the sympathy necessary for moral action.  The dilemma, however, is that mind is not observable.  Using Middlemarch, in particular, I will demonstrate that Eliot makes a protracted attempt to make certain metaphysical (or “metaphysiological”) properties visible by using recent development in physiological perception.  Ironically, her methodology for observing another’s mind opens the possibility that other metaphysical objects (like God) may be contemplated as well.

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