Why Care About Flat Characters?: Katie Ebner-Landy in conversation with Marta Figlerowicz and Deidre Lynch
Date and Time
Location
Sponsor: Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on Novel Theory
Speakers: Katie Ebner-Landy, Utrecht University; Marta Figlerowicz, Yale University; Deidre Lynch, Harvard University
Zoom registration required, if you attend online.
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Please join us for a conversation about Professor Katie Ebner-Landy’s The Character Sketch as Philosophy: Manners, Mores, Types (Harvard University Press, 2024). In the fourth century BCE, the philosopher Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, composed thirty character sketches depicting ordinary Athenian vices: idle chatter, bad timing, cowardice, shamelessness, and superstition, among others. Centuries later, this enigmatic text—known as the Characters—was feverishly translated and imitated by early modern Europeans convinced of its moral and political importance. Tracing this resurgence of the Theophrastan tradition, Katie Ebner-Landy sheds new light on the role of the character sketch as a philosophical tool. A revealing intellectual history, The Character Sketch as Philosophy also encourages us to consider what literary description might contribute to ethics and political thought today—and to think critically about the kinds of character sketches on which we still rely, from the snob to the mansplainer.