Philosophy + Literature Workshop: Yi-Ping Ong

The Philosophy + Literature Focal Group welcomes Yi-Ping Ong for a workshop titled “Freedom, Self-Knowledge, and Authenticity: Philosophy in the Golden Age of the Novel”.

Yi-Ping Ong is an associate Professor of Comparative Thought and Literature and member of the Faculty Board of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Her teaching focuses on 19th and 20th century literature and philosophy, reflecting interests in the history and theory of the realist novel, modernism, existentialism, and issues of justice and ethics in contemporary world literature. Her research centers on questions at the intersection of philosophy and literature; her monograph The Art of Being: Poetics of the Novel and Existentialist Philosophy examines issues of authority, freedom, and self-knowledge in the poetics of the 19th and 20th century realist novel.

Her current project Philosophy in the Golden Age of the Novel (from which our discussion follows), further explores the power of literary form to transform the aims and methods of philosophy. For centuries, the novel was considered inferior to works of history, religion, science, philosophy, and biography. Philosophers who turned to literature overlooked the novel in favor of more prestigious genres such as drama and poetry. But all of this changed in the Golden Age of the Novel. The rise of the realist novel transformed the imagination of everyday life within philosophy. Bringing together novel history with a significant turning point in the history of thought, this talk explores how the form of the novel raised new problems of freedom, self-knowledge, and social reality for thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Heidegger.

RSVP