Survival emotions, often conceived of as biologically driven, are also culturally and socially formed; the way we think and feel about pandemics was shaped by early eighteenth-century reactions to crisis. Kathryn Temple of Georgetown University examines these emotions through a reading of Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Journal of a Plague Year in light of what Duncan Kennedy has called the “fundamental contradiction,” that between our emotional attachment to “liberty,” versus our need for communities that protect that liberty. The great London plague of 1664-1665 killed an estimated 100,000 of 460,000 Londoners. But Defoe’s frenetic efforts to “account” for both the plague and reactions to it through detailed statistics and “scientific” observations failed miserably to explain the human reactions to what was actually a global pandemic.
What Defoe does succeed at is the delineation of certain narrative conventions—including that of the spiritual inventory—that have driven pandemic narratives from the time of the Journal to today’s pandemic. In Defoe's Journal the "fundamental contradiction" is expressed through this spiritual accounting as Defoe's protagonist attempts to "account" not only for the pandemic but for his own and other's reactions to it. In this online webinar Temple will discuss her paper on Defoe's Journal, followed by a Q&A moderated by Michael Scott.
This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project, the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, the Georgetown Master’s Program in the Engaged and Public Humanities, Campion Hall, and the Las Casas Institute (Blackfriars).
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Kathryn Temple is a professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University where she has taught since 1994. She specializes in the study of law and the humanities. Among her publications are Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (2019) and the co-edited Research Handbook on Law and Emotions (2021). Her humanities outreach activities include work with military veterans and the incarcerated.
Professor Michael Scott (moderator) is Senior Dean, Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, the University of Oxford college adviser for postgraduate students, and a Member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior adviser to the president at Georgetown University. Scott was on the editorial board which relaunched Critical Survey from Oxford University Press. Scott previously served as the pro vice chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University.
