Our special session at MLA 2027—“Hegel and Literature: The Concept of Life and its Representation”—will seek to bring together literature scholars who examine how G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy, particularly the work contained in the Lectures on Aesthetics and Science of Logic, illuminates literary forms and genres. In recent years, the disciplines of English and Comparative Literature have paid attention to the elements of Hegel’s philosophical system that seem to anticipate the literary modes of realism and modernism. Always regarded as one of the forerunners of critical theory, Hegel is now being recast as someone whose thought has much to offer students of literature trying to think through the philosophical content we are presented with in reading a novel, poem, or play. Following the work of Robert Pippin and many others on this front, the task of the presenters will be to rethink a particular philosophy as a lens through which to view and begin reconceptualizing the project that has been foregrounded in modern literature since the inception of realism in the nineteenth century, namely the creative agenda of representing everyday life, life as it is lived which typically does not conform to the trappings of plot or display the high dramas often found in a novel. Against the post-conceptual turn in the humanities, we want to ask, with Hegel as our guide: what is the conceptual work that modern literature in all of its forms, but especially the novel, undertakes? And how does this conceptual work help to shed further light on realist and modernist literary styles and approaches to characterization?

While “conceptual work” is vague and in need of clarification, all of the presenters will offer their answers to the question above in ways that aim ultimately to illuminate its content. For Leif Turner, our first presenter, the conceptual labors of the modern novel center on the category invoked above, life. As he intends to show, this category is cited by Henry James, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, writers who bring realism and modernism together, as “the limit and measure of the novel’s truth”. The section on the concept of life in Hegel’s Logic and some related passages in the Aesthetics will be used to achieve a retheorization of this concept as defined in the modern novel through its characters’ capacities to see themselves as subjects reasoning systematically as they navigate the world. Thinking along similar lines in ways that may provoke interesting conversations between the panelists, John Souza plans to turn to the Hegelian idea of speculation to rethink the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. For him, the speculative gives a name to precisely the movement in Hegel’s thought whereby consciousness begins to recognize its objects as crucial for its self-understanding. Viewed in this light, the speculative can be seen to prefigure the emergence of life as a category, an event at the center of Leif Turner’s analysis. And, in her talk centering on the “realist rendering of the inert, the prosaic, and the banal,” aspects of life that novels must take account of if they are to be classified as realist works of literature, Alejandra Mena aims to show that Hegel’s lack of enthusiasm for natural landscapes is demonstrated by Francis Ponge in his realist prose poetry. Lastly, in confronting a contemporary problem, that of AI and its use and abuse, Melanie Swan has the goal of examining acts of self-making in Hegel alongside those seen in the novels of Joseph Conrad, arguing that these represent “realist-modernist impulses” helping us “prepare for living in the new world of AI as a social institution”. All of the presenters will be taking up the thematics of self-making as central not only in Hegel but also in the literary texts their work foregrounds. It is my hope that by bringing these presenters together whose diverse approaches to their respective topics are informed by comparative literature frameworks, ecocriticism, affect studies, and vitalism, the discussion we have in wrapping up the session will get us to probe further the precise relationship of philosophy to literature. To allow for fifteen minutes of discussion, I will be informing the speakers that they must limit themselves to 13-14 minutes for their presentations. Once they have been speaking for longer than thirteen minutes, I will raise my hand so as to signal that it is time for them to wrap up. And, should they go past the 14-minute mark, I will cut them off.