Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/12/2024
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
The Humanities Center welcomes Rachel Arteaga, Associate Director of the Simpson Center at University of Washington. Rachel will join us to discuss the new MLA report, that she helped coauthor, about career prospects for English majors and minors and how departments can help prepare their students for success. This conversation will take place on Thursday, September 12 at 11:00 am in 4010 JFSB.
Later that afternoon, Rachel will join us as our weekly colloquium speaker at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. Her presentation will examine how joy is portrayed in American literature and how reading about joy can help us cultivate it in our own lives.
Title: “Feelings of Faith in American Literature”
This talk explores representations of religious emotion in American literature—with specific attention to joy—as it is understood and described across Christian theological traditions. While much of contemporary affect theory takes the view that emotion and cognition are separate systems, Christian writers from many denominations and historical periods tend to share the position that our thoughts and feelings are deeply interconnected and mutually informing. I refer to the general agreement on this point as the Christian orthodoxy of feeling. Following it, I contend that Christian conviction is often depicted in literary texts as substantiated by emotional experience. To take one example, in her posthumously published prayer journal, the Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor writes, “intellectually, I assent: let us adore God. But can we do that without feeling? To feel, we must know.” What insights might we derive from a feeling like joy? And, as the Calvinist novelist Marilynne Robinson suggests in her essay on the ways in which we can keep ourselves from living lives of what she calls “joyless urgency,” can reading literary texts, especially those in which joy is intricately described, help us to cultivate it in ourselves?
About our guest:
Rachel Arteaga is Associate Director of the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she supports emerging research in the humanities and social sciences and advocates for the value of these areas of study to the broader society.
She recently served the Association of Departments of English—a disciplinary division within the Modern Language Association—as chair of an ad hoc committee on English Majors’ Career Preparation and Outcomes, helping to produce a report documenting that, despite myths to the contrary, English majors experience success and satisfaction in their career paths.
Her scholarship on American literature, which draws upon Christian theological traditions and contemporary theories of affect and emotion, has appeared in the Flannery O’Connor Review, Literature Interpretation Theory, and Early American Literature. She holds the PhD in English from the University of Washington.
