Elaine Auyoung, associate professor of English at the University of Minnesota, has been hearing about the Dickens Universe for almost 20 years, ever since she was an undergraduate at Stanford. But what with one thing and another, she was never able to attend. She is very excited to be making her Universe debut as one of our speakers.
The daughter of immigrants from Hong Kong, she first encountered Dickens in her first year in high school, when she read A Tale of Two Cities. It defined what a “classic” was for her. She also came to find that 19th-century British novels really resonated with her.
At Stanford, she had the good fortune to participate in Alex Woloch’s Dickens seminar, which was formative for her. She learned how to really engage deeply with a text through close reading. The seminar also brought out the warmth and humanity in Dickens, embodied in Woloch, whom she says was always “a source of cheer.” She feels these qualities are reflected in the celebratory aspect of the Universe.
Her work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on cognitive psychology, philosophy, and women and gender studies, among other fields. Her current book project, Becoming Sensitive, applies research on learning and expertise to democratize literary study and to bring out aspects of engaging with literature that tend to be invisible or undervalued in the literature classroom.
This work informs her approach to communicating about literature—in other words, preparing a talk for a highly heterogeneous audience. Her ideal is to maintain intellectual rigor while also removing unnecessary barriers such as excessive jargon. She feels that non-experts have much to teach experts about the way they approach and enjoy literature, and she is looking forward to spending a week with Dickens fans.
She is also looking forward to the whole Universe experience. In addition to the celebratory aspect that she mentioned, she imagines that being with a community of readers focused on the same text will lend itself to increasingly deep conversations about Great Expectations, and that she will learn a lot.
Auyoung will deliver the Tuesday evening lecture, Learning to Feel Ashamed of Home, during Universe week. Please welcome her to our community and ensure that her Expectations are fulfilled.
