Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel provides an alternative to the conventional wisdom produced by two staple texts for literary and cultural studies: Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel and Edward Said’s Orientalism.  The talk is taken from a forthcoming book of the same title that turns us away from the linear, nationally-oriented histories of the realist novel to the cross-cultural, multifarious, and allusive domain of Oriental fiction and fantasy. While oceans of ink have been spilled on the rise of the novel (McKeon, Richetti, Armstrong, Warner, Gallagher, Moretti, Pavel, just to name a scant handful), once we locate eighteenth-century fiction in the transcultural transactions of Enlightenment Orientalism, we see that the novel does not spring exclusively from an autonomous and insular European modernity.  Once we come to read eighteenth-century Oriental fictions as an extraordinary confluence of crosscultural possibilities, we also recognize them as thought-experiments that imagine other worlds and ways of being.  Not grounded in narcissistic identification or mimetic realism, Enlightenment Orientalism suggests alternatives to narrative models predicated on the psychological depth of the Western autonomous individual.

Srinivas Aravamudan was appointed dean of the humanities at Duke in July 2009. At Duke, he is Professor in the Departments of English, Romance Studies, and the Program in Literature. He directed the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute (2003-2009) and is president of the Consortium of Humanties Centers and Institutes from 2007-2012. He has published Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (1999, Duke University Press) and Guru English: South Asian Religion In a Cosmopolitan Language (2006, Princeton University Press and 2007, Penguin India). His next book, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011.  Aravamudan has also edited a number of other publications and written a large number of scholarly articles and essays on topics that range from eighteenth-century studies to postcolonial theory, and political philosophy to the theory of fiction.  He is currently writing a book on sovereignty and the concept of anachronism.