Presented by Aaron Santesso, associate professor of literature at Georgia Tech. In the vast majority of current academic and public conversation on the topic, privacy is offered up as an unquestioned good, and those who would restrict it become unambiguous villains. Unfortunately, most of the people engaging in this conversation have no clear sense of the true complexity of privacy. In fact, for a good deal of modern Western history privacy was a controversial quality, one understood as having drawbacks as well as advantages. This talk will trace the origins and modern traces of that earlier debate -- one which was played out to a surprisingly large extent in literature -- and point to the ways in which old literary questions are suddenly legally relevant to our own age.