Mary Mullen will give a lecture titled, "The Aesthetics of Interest in an Age of Question: Representing Ireland" at Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University on Thursday, March 23. The talk pairs Edward Said’s reflection on the series of “interests” that underlie Orientalism with Sianne Ngai’s account of interesting as an aesthetic category, in order to consider the difficulty in sustaining British interest in colonial locations. The talk focuses on the novel as a form of “sustained interest”—drawing on work by William Carleton and Anthony Trollope—and the rhetorical form of the question—especially “The Irish Question”—to suggest that the very act of encouraging readers to take an interest in a foreign place can also direct their attention away from the people who inhabit this place.
