What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

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Updated 03 May 2025
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What We Are Reading Today: Human Forms

  • In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy

Author: Ian Duncan

The 120 years between Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) marked both the rise of the novel and the shift from the presumption of a stable, universal human nature to one that changes over time.

In “Human Forms,” Ian Duncan reorients our understanding of the novel’s formation during its cultural ascendancy, arguing that fiction produced new knowledge in a period characterized by the interplay between literary and scientific discourses, even as the two were separating into distinct domains.

 


What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Disease of Boredom’ by Josefa Ros Velasco

Updated 01 February 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Disease of Boredom’ by Josefa Ros Velasco

Boredom visits all of us at some point. Sometimes it is fleeting. Other times it is deep, lasting, or profound. We even experience it in groups.

Boredom can be so intolerable that some are willing to do almost anything just to escape it. In this provocative and eloquently argued book, Josefa Ros Velasco invites us to listen to the voice of boredom, explore the reasons behind it, and allow it to guide our actions and return us to a place of satisfaction.

She shows how boredom is a phenomenon that torments us when reality does not meet our expectations.