On March 15, 2024, Nathan Gorelick, term assistant professor of English, published a new book titled The Unwritten Enlightenment: Literature Between Ideology and the Unconscious with Northwestern University Press.
His new work analyzes the fantasies that fueled the Enlightenment period, examining how the literary trends and practices of the time ultimately led to the creation of modern literature. Paying particular attention to the movement’s efforts to invent new notions of subjectivity and individualism, Gorelick explores modern literary criticism and psychoanalysis’ shared origins in the Enlightenment era’s novels and the discourse that surrounded them. As Gorelick explains, modern concepts of literature and the unconscious were generated in response to what the language of the Enlightenment excludes, represses, or struggles to erase. With The Unwritten Enlightenment, Gorelick ultimately seeks to emphasize the danger of criticizing the Enlightenment’s deficiencies, ambiguities, and legacies of violence without regard for the unconscious fantasies that drive them. Failing to acknowledge this history, he asserts, risks reproducing the very patterns of thought, action, and imagination that the Enlightenment novel already unsettles.