On Tuesday, November 7, Helena Michie (Rice University) will give a talk titled “Middlemarch and Anniversary Thinking” at 3:30 pm in McClung 1210.
What does it mean to be celebrating George Eliotʼs 200th “birthday”?
Professor Michie will celebrate the bicentennial of George Eliot by exploring the cultural importance of the anniversary and what she calls anniversary thinking—that way of imagining time that records distance between events while acknowledging and relying
on repetition. She will go on to explore a specific set of anniversaries: three times (out of many) that she read Middlemarch and was inspired by noticing a different word. In the course of the talk Professor Michie will consider the act of rereading and its ties to other
forms of temporality; the intimacies of life as a reader; the power of difficult words; the relation between private and professional acts of reading; and the limits and possibilities of anniversary thinking.
Helena Michie is the author of five books in Victorian Studies and the study of gender and sexuality. Her most recent book, Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor, with Robyn Warhol, won the North American Victorian Studies Associations 2015 Best Book of the Year prize. Professor Michie teaches courses in feminist theory, literary theory, and Victorian literature and culture. She also teaches classes and workshops on professional writing. Professor Michie has served over the years in a number of administrative positions, including English Department Chair, director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and the founding Faculty Advisory Board Chair for the program in Writing and Communication.
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