Curator
Nancy Ruttenburg
Ruttenburg teaches at Stanford University, where she is the William Robertson Coe Professo
Ruttenburg teaches at Stanford University, where she is the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature. She is the author, most recently, Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2008).
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Plasticity, Form, and the Matter of Character in Middlemarch
Journal Articlefrom
Representations 130.1 (2015)
Understanding the important role of character in George Eliot’s realist aesthetic entails close attention to the way she engages with the physical and mathematical sciences.
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Persons and Optics
Essay
“Embodiment” surely does take place. But we still have everything to learn about how and why.
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The Representation of Persons and What They Own Themselves to Be
Essay
If ephemeral genres of fiction erupted in opposition to the novel even before the novel had fully got under way, what inclination in the imagination or mind of the public made their anarchy and singularity so interesting?
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Being in Love
Essay
For most of its short generic life, the novel has depended on marriage and childbirth as signs of sexual relationship, and has had a difficulty representing sexual life beyond marriage and childbirth without the assistance of figurative language. How do novels, especially those of D.H. Lawrence, represent sex?
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Being in Fiction: Recognition and the Ownership of Life
Essay
I find myself here in the rather awkward position of speaking from two different perspectives, one, that of the novelist, the other, that of the critic. For a long time I have argued against this notion of two perspectives, considering them simply different... more

Probability and Literary Being
Essay
Why write a dialogue? The ideas that follow grew out of conversations between the two of us, and although they might someday find their way into a journal article or a book chapter, it seemed worthwhile to acknowledge them for what they are now: speculative and provisional, germinal, we hope, in both senses of that word.
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