Arts and Events Calendar

Byatt will look at how 19th century scientific histories of the earth affected the form of the novel, from Honoré de Balzac and the tension between his Christian beliefs and his interest in humans as animals, to George Eliot and her use of Lyell and Darwin to shape her forms. In Byatt’s own work, particularly in novels like Possession and Angels and Insects, she has moved between natural history, the fragments of human recollections, and the mystery of identity. In Possession, grave-robbing literary critics attempt to unearth (quite literally) a literary mystery surrounding an elusive 19th century female poet and the expansive male poet with whom she may have had a child. In Angels and Insects (a pair of novellas), Byatt returns to the 19th century — to the world of Darwin, Tennyson and Charlotte Brontë — attempting to understand a historical moment in which evolution fought with spiritualism. Her work asks how, short of disturbing the earth, we are to imagine human lives separate from our own — whether through the vastness of Darwinian time, the interconnected world of ants and lovers, or the possibility of the human spirit’s escaping the body and entering pure (if terrifying) unearthly consciousness. As a writer who moves between a beautiful, quotidian realism and the haunting world of ghosts, she consistently addresses the difficulty of understanding our literary as well as our biological inheritance — where does any individual story begin or end? Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book, brilliantly blends “real” people, historical events and her own imaginings. But what all of her fiction reveals most powerfully is our endless desire to recognize ourselves.

A reception and book signing will follow the event.

Organized by the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in conjunction with the College Commons