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Forthcoming Events (past Network events can be found here)

 

Send info (including the exact date, time, location, the name of the sponsoring organization, contact email, and URL) to catherine.labio[@]colorado.edu before the 1st of each month in the academic calendar (September - April)

 

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* indicates the event is organized by the 18th- & 19th-Century Studies Network

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* In-Person Lecture: Lauren Kopajtic, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, "Rhetorical and Literary Style from Adam Smith to Jane Austen”

 

Monday, 13 October 2025 @ 5:00 pm (refreshments at 4:30 pm)

 

Location: The Center for British & Irish Studies, Norlin Library, M549, University of Colorado Boulder

 

Sponsors: The Center for British & Irish Studies and the 18th- & 19th-Century Studies Network

 

Abstract: 

Adam Smith is still widely considered an economist first and a moral philosopher second, but he first made his name as an intellectual with a series of public lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres. Smith's interest in rhetoric and the literary arts persisted throughout his life and career, and while he never finished the planned "philosophical history of all the different branches of Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, and Eloquence" (and ordered the unfinished manuscript to be destroyed after his death), he regularly revised, added to, and fine-tuned his first published work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). This paper examines TMS as a literary and philosophical work, seeking to answer the following questions: What rhetorical forms does Smith employ? To what purpose does Smith put these forms? What are the limitations of these forms and how might they fail? I suggest that one of the techniques Smith analyzes and employs, indirect internal description, is a precursor of the free indirect style that Jane Austen perfected in her novels. Concluding with examples from Austen, Smith, Sterne, and Equiano, I consider the relation between literary form and genre and argumentative purpose.

 

Lauren Kopajtic is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She specializes in eighteenth-century philosophy, with a focus on David Hume, Adam Smith, Rousseau, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In addition to publishing articles on sympathy, self-control, education, and other core topics in moral philosophy, she is also dedicated to engaging with genres, forms, and figures that are not standardly considered in philosophical work. Dr. Kopajtic is also the Editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy, and the Director of the Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy. 

 

Questions? email labio@colorado.edu

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