Manya Lempert

Interests

Teaching

British and European modernism, post-colonial literature, Victorian literature and culture, literature and science, literature and philosophy, the history and theory of the novel, ancient tragedy, contemporary fiction, disability studies.

Research

British and European modernism, post-colonial literature, Victorian literature and culture, literature and science, literature and philosophy, the history and theory of the novel, ancient tragedy, contemporary fiction, disability studies.

Courses

Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Lempert, M. (2020). Tragedy and the Modernist Novel. Cambridge University Press.

Journals/Publications

• Lempert, M. (2021). Climate Tragedy. The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 8(2), 195-213.
• Lempert, M. (2018). Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin and the Rebirth of Tragedy. Twentieth-Century Literature, 64(4), 449-482.
  More info

  Although critics have tended to answer the question “Does Woolf write tragedies?” in the negative, Woolf rekindles a Greek perspective in which the universe is devoid of salvation and poetic justice. Woolf follows Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides—a literary, not a philosophical or anthropological, heritage—when she represents characters’ undeserved, uncompensated pains. Woolf’s thinking aligns her with Charles Darwin in the natural sciences. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. This essay reads Woolf’s oft-cited rejection of teleological form and her aesthetics of the momentary as responses to Darwinism and expressions of her tragic philosophy: characters’ short-lived “moments of being” stand in insoluble conflict with the expansive time of natural history.
• Lempert, M. (2017). Thomas Hardy’s Theory of Tragic Character. Studies in the Novel, 49(4), 470-492.
  More info

  As a tragic novelist, Hardy departs from realism and privileges nonnarrative affect over plot. Hardy’s novels, like Athenian tragedies, contest the irrevocable plot at hand. In Athenian tragedy, storylines beyond heroines’ control destroy their good character, while they or others lament the injustice of such plots. So in _Tess_, Angel assumes that what Tess was made to do, against her will, redefines her to her detriment; her narrator protests her innocence. This is, I show, the antithesis of the Aristotelian model of tragedy in which protagonists themselves inadvertently cause their demises, but are understood to be morally uncorrupted in the process. It is different, too, from the Christian reading of tragedy in which heroines fall because of their moral vices. The latter, however, is the view that Sue adopts in _Jude_. Hardy marshals these contrasting conceptions of tragedy—Athenian, Aristotelian, Christian—to indict rape culture and internalized victim-blaming.

Presentations

• Lempert, M. (2019, Spring). Undeserved Suffering. Conference: "On Suffering: Pain, Precarity, and the Disintegration of the Self,” convened by Ato Quayson. New York, NY: NYU English Department.
• Lempert, M. (2019, Spring). Woolf's Outsides. Panel, "Rereading the Book of Nature," American Comparative Literature Association. Washington, D.C.: American Comparative Literature Association.
• Lempert, M. (2018, Fall). "Becoming unclean with joy": Clarice Lispector's The Passion According to G.H.. Panel Organizer: "Forms of Joy," Modernist Studies Association Annual Meeting. Columbus, OH: Modernist Studies Association.
• Lempert, M. (2018, Spring). “‘Eyeless and So Terrible’: Woolf’s Environments”. 2018 American Comparative Literature Association Conference (Panel: Modernism and the Environment). Los Angeles, CA: American Comparative Literature Association.
• Lempert, M. (2017, Summer). Introduction of and conversation with Simon Critchley. University of Chicago Seminary Co-Op Bookstore Colloquium and Podcast. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago / Seminary Co-Op Bookstore.
• Lempert, M. (2016, March). The Ethics of Recoil. American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (Seminar: Narrative and Ethics). Harvard University: American Comparative Literature Association.
  More info

  My paper treats Camus’ The Stranger as a negative example of how to live – a fiction that is ethically productive precisely because it spurs its readers to recoil from its first-person narrator. Blocked identification, I argue, is the ethical modus operandi of this novel. I’ll suggest that this is increasingly the case in modernist fiction – in narratives that increasingly animate nihilistic characters (characters who cannot attach themselves to any values). I’ll also be citing Beckett’s The Unnamable & Fernando Pessoa’s The Education of the Stoic as examples. I’ll be tackling Plato’s charge against ancient tragedy too: that it invites an identification with character that is ethically dangerous. If a strain of modernism, then, revives a Greek tragic outlook (as I argue), I’ll suggest that it also overcomes Plato’s objection by inoculating readers – via negative examples – against a tragic vision that results in ethical paralysis. I’ll suggest that understanding of – then recoil from – fictional characters may purge us of “bad” ethics. I’ll mention Sartre’s contention, too, that no good novel can side with injustice; it can only drive us to indict injustice. Is this theory, I ask, borne out by Kamel Daoud’s 2013 novelistic reply to / indictment of Camus, Meursault contre-ênquete? How does this “counter-inquiry” reveal Daoud’s (and his narrator’s) reading practices? Does it offer its own contrary vision of fictional character, one that makes empathy again possible? Not quite!
• Lempert, M. (2016, November). Recoil from Fictional Minds. Panel Organizer, "Mind-Altering Modernist Fictions," Modernist Studies Association. Pasadena, CA: Modernist Studies Association.
  More info

  Much recent debate has sought to articulate how art affects its audiences – what are the benefits and hazards of immersion in fiction, or conversely, of critical distance? Is Adornian critique art’s raison d’être, or do art's value lie more in “naïve” forms of attachment and perspective-taking, as Martha Nussbaum and Rita Felski have variously argued? Our panel treats both early modernism’s conceptions of desirable make-believe and later modernism's appeal to “imaginative resistance” -- as well as a postwar turn to theorizing impressionable minds subject to dangerous coercion. We each propose modernist theories of the ways in which human artifacts change human minds. Our panels sets these theories in the contexts of secularization/nihilism and of war/totalitarianism/colonialism -- as authors picture how art can either improve our minds or open them to harmful manipulation. David Lewis’ paper, “Making Fantasy into Reality,” finds that modernist authors themselves argue for the beneficial power of fantasy (pretending) to alter mental states; they celebrate the idea that modern subjects can manipulate their own psychologies, making fantasy real by way of text and environment. Lewis brings to light modernist architects who contend that architectural fantasies (built environments) allow us to imagine that we inhabit a certain reality, until that reality becomes true for us; this author JM Barrie elaborately constructs his London flat in order to make his ideals seem more real. Manya Lempert’s paper, “Recoil from Fictional Worlds,” suggests that modernist art can cement our commitments in the opposite manner, by inducing us to flee from make-believe spaces – the fictional worlds of novels – whose moral landscapes we do not wish to inhabit. Considering Camus' The Stranger (1942) and The Fall (1956), as well as Fernando Pessoa's The Education of the Stoic (1932) and Beckett's The Unnamable (1953), Lempert argues that such works are designed to block identification with their central characters, and that self-protective recoil from fictional minds and milieus can purge readers of “bad” ethics. Kamel Daoud’s 2013 novelistic reply to Camus, however, dramatizes just how difficult it can be to get noxious fictions out of our systems. Finally, Scott Selisker's paper, “Late Modernism’s Programmable Minds,” takes up George Orwell’s and Anthony Burgess’s understandings of art’s roles after totalitarianism. Both authors inherit versions of a modernist vitalism that takes on new urgencies, and new meanings, in the post-war era. In their most popular works—1984 (1949) and A Clockwork Orange (1962)—these authors develop alternate versions of behaviorist psychology and of institutional critique that emphasize a wholly manipulable human subject—constituted as what William James called a “bundle of habits”—in the totalitarian state and the welfare state, respectively. For both authors, Selisker argues, believing in a human subjectivity beyond the ken of institutional manipulation is tantamount to believing, as in Jameson’s well-known description of modernism, in the autonomy of the aesthetic.
• Lempert, M. (2014, August). Beckett: Refusing Recognition. Tilburg Philosophy Summer School (Semnar: Tragedy as Philosophy); convened by Simon Critchley. Tilburg, the Netherlands: Tilburg Philosophy Summer School.
• Lempert, M. (2014, August). It is enough!. Tilburg Philosophy Summer School (Semnar: Tragedy as Philosophy); convened by Simon Critchley. Tilburg, the Netherlands: Tilburg Philosophy Summer School.
• Lempert, M. (2014, June). Woolf’s Tragic Worlds. Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (Panel: The Greeks). Chicago, IL: International Virginia Woolf Society.
• Lempert, M. (2012, April). Hardy’s Novel Tragedy. UC Berkeley Colloquium on Thomas Hardy. UC Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.
• Lempert, M. (2012, October). Woolf’s Immitigable Time. Modernist Studies Association (Seminar: Generation M: Experiential/Experimental Time). Las Vegas, NV: Modernist Studies Association.
• Lempert, M. (2011, August). Novelistic Tragedy. Dickens Universe. University of California, Santa Cruz: Dickens Universe.
• Lempert, M. (2011, October). Modernism’s Human Nature. Modernist Studies Association (Seminar: Modernism and Neuroscience). Buffalo, New York: Modernist Studies Association.
• Lempert, M. (2009, March). The Philosophical Rewards of an Untenable Fictional World. American Comparative Literature Association (Seminar: Literature, Linguistics, and the Border between Orality and Literacy). Harvard University: American Comparative Literature Association.

Poster Presentations

• Lempert, M. (2012, April). Homo Tragicus: Darwin’s Legacy in Literature. Consilience Conference (on evolution in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities). University of Missouri, Saint Louis: University of Missouri, Saint Louis.

Others

• Lempert, M. (2020, April). “Emergency Literature”. Cambridge University Press fifteeneightyfour blog.
• Lempert, M. (2020, November). “Tracing Tragedy: Classical Reception in Modernist Literature.”. Society for Classical Studies blog.
• Lempert, M. (2020, November). “Tragedy, Art of Dissent”. Cambridge University Press fifteeneightyfour blog.