We are delighted to welcome Jennifer Fleissner, Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Fleissner’s talk is titled Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem.

The event will be held at 5pm in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall.

If you are interested in attending, please RSVP here to receive a PDF excerpt of Fleissner’s work.

We are delighted to welcome Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor Emeritus of American Studies and English at Yale University. Professor Dimock's talk is titled A Long History of Pandemics.

The event will be held at 5pm in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall. The talk will be preceded by a reception in the Terrace Room from 4:30pm.

A Long History of Pandemics tells an epic story, beginning with vaccine development in the twenty-first century, and reaching back to the smallpox epidemic in the eighteenth. Focusing on the Cherokee’s public health strategies and the Navajo’s collaboration with NASA in drought forecasting, we explore the art of narrative as a crucial complement to science and technology, turning the legacy of harm from the past into a path towards a different future.

Wai Chee Dimock writes about public health, climate change, and indigenous communities, focusing on the symbiotic relation between diverse forms of intelligence. She is now at Harvard’s Center for the Environment, working on a new book, “Saved by Nonhumans: Surviving Pandemics and Climate Change with Microbes and Machines,” and on a collaborative project, “AI for Climate Resilience,” cosponsored by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs.  

Dimock’s most recent book is Weak Planet (2020). Other books include Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006);  Shades of the Planet (2007); and a team-edited anthology, American Literature in the World: Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler ( 2017). Her 1996 book, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy, was reissued in a new edition in 2021. Her essays have appeared in Artforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hill,  Los Angeles Review of Books, New York Times,  New Yorker, and Scientific American. 

Dimock was a consultant for “Invitation to World Literature,” a 13-part series produced by WGBH and aired on PBS stations in the fall of 2010. A related Facebook forum, “Rethinking World Literature,” is still ongoing.

Participants: Charne Lavery, Isabel Hofmeyr, Vilashini Cooppan, Michaela Bronstein

Join us on Thursday, November 3rd for the next Center for the Study of the Novel’s Books at the Center event. We are delighted to welcome Charne Lavery and Isabel Hofmeyr, authors of Writing Ocean Worlds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Dockside Reading (Duke University Press, 2022), respectively. They will be joined in discussion by Vilashini Cooppan (Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UCSC) and Michaela Bronstein (English, Stanford).

Writing Ocean Worlds explores the Indian Ocean world as it is produced by colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. It analyses the work of three contemporary authors who write the Indian Ocean as a region and world―Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Lindsey Collen―alongside maritime-imperial precursor Joseph Conrad. If postcolonial literatures are sometimes read as national allegories, this book presents an account of a different and significant strand of postcolonial fiction whose geography, in contrast, is coastal and transoceanic. This work imaginatively links east Africa, south Asia and the Arab world via a network of south-south connections that precedes and survives European imperialism. The novels and stories provide a vivid, storied sense of place on both a local and an oceanic scale, and in so doing remap the world as having its centre in the ocean and the south.

In Dockside Reading Isabel Hofmeyr traces the relationships among print culture, colonialism, and the ocean through the institution of the British colonial Custom House. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, dockside customs officials would leaf through publications looking for obscenity, politically objectionable materials, or reprints of British copyrighted works, often dumping these condemned goods into the water. These practices, echoing other colonial imaginaries of the ocean as a space for erasing incriminating evidence of the violence of empire, informed later censorship regimes under apartheid in South Africa. By tracking printed matter from ship to shore, Hofmeyr shows how literary institutions like copyright and censorship were shaped by colonial control of coastal waters. Set in the environmental context of the colonial port city, Dockside Reading explores how imperialism colonizes water. Hofmeyr examines this theme through the concept of hydrocolonialism, which puts together land and sea, empire and environment.

The event will take place in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall on Thursday, November 5th at 5pm.

Charne Lavery is a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and researcher on the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), University of the Witwatersrand. She explores literary and cultural representations of the deep ocean, the Indian Ocean, and the Southern Ocean and Antarctic seas, researching oceanic underworlds of the global South from a postcolonial-ecological perspective. She is the South African Humanities and Social Sciences delegate to the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), co-editor of the Palgrave series Maritime Literature and Culture, and has recently published articles on ‘The Oceanic South’ and ‘Antarctica and Africa’.

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor of African Literature at Wits and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. Over the last two decades, she has pioneered research on global, oceanic and transnational forms of literary and cultural history that seek to understand Africa’s place in the world. A leading scholar of the Indian Ocean world, Hofmeyr has served as Acting Director of the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, which she played a leading role in establishing. Her prize-winning books include The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1994); Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (2013) and Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons (2015) (co-edited with Antoinette Burton).

Vilashini Cooppan is Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford, 2009), "Teaching Anglophone World Literature," in Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures (De Gruyter, 2020), "Nobody's Novel," in The Cambridge Companion to the Novel (Cambridge, 2018), and "World Literature Between History and Theory," in The Routledge Companion to World Literature (Routledge, 2013), among others.

Michaela Bronstein is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Stanford. She is the author of Out of Context: The Uses of Modernist Fiction (Oxford, 2018), "Four Generations, One Crime" in Crime Fiction as World Literature, (Bloomsbury, 2017), and "From Bolshevism to Bloomsbury: The Garnett Translations and Russian Politics in England" in the Bloomsbury Handbook to the Bloomsbury Group, (2017). Her current manuscript-in-progress is titled Crimes for All Humanity: Revolution and the Modern Novel.

This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome, and we hope to see you there!

Allie Gamble (algamble@stanford.edu)
Ido Keren (ikeren@stanford.edu)
Alex Sherman (ajsherm@stanford.edu)

Join us at the CSN's annual Ian Watt Lecture in the History and Theory of the Novel event.  

We are delighted to have with us Sianne Ngai, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at The University of Chicago, presenting on “Inhabiting Error: From Last Christmas to Senior’s Last Hour”.   

The event will take place in person in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall on June 3rd. 

Doug Battersby, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University (2021-23), will present a draft chapter from his second book project, tentatively titled The Novel and the Heart: 1840-1940. The chapter is titled “Exhibiting Bodily Affect: Thomas Hardy’s Betraying Heart”.

Michaela Bronstein, Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University, has kindly agreed to act as Doug’s respondent.

The event will take place in person in Studio 40 of McClatchy Hall on Thursday, May 19th, from 5-7pm.

While the term “humanitarian narrative” is common in literary, social, and humanitarian studies, even Thomas Laqueur, who was among the first to use it, did not offer a specific definition. In a broad sense, we can define “humanitarian narrative” as a type of text that provokes sympathy in readers for those in need. This sympathy can serve as an impetus for further actions like charitable donations and social activism, or even result in the granting of asylum or refugee status to the protagonists in these narratives. Considering the potential impact that humanitarian narratives can have on individuals in “real life”, what kinds of specific devices or narrative techniques may ensure not only sympathy, but also action on the part of the reader? How can one depict a crisis and those affected in a respectful way, such that due attention is brought to the urgency of a situation without reducing affected individuals to mere bodies in need? To what extent are authenticity and credibility important for the effectiveness of humanitarian narrative, and does the literary medium enhance the notion of authenticity or challenge it, potentially perpetuating a “culture of disbelief” among readers? We hope to address these questions at our round table discussion during the next meeting of the Working Group on Narrative. 

Short papers will be presented by DLCL PhD candidates Olga Ovcharskaia (Slavic) and Irene Kuo (German) and by Professor Gavin Jones (English), with a discussion to follow.

The event will take place in person in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall on Thursday, April 28th, from 5-7pm.

Alexander Lin, PhD student in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley, will be presenting a draft paper titled ‘Narrative Mask-Making in Nietzsche and the Novel’.

Professor Nancy Ruttenburg (English, Stanford) has kindly agreed to act as respondent.

Abstract
As part of a developing dissertation project on 18th-20th century German and Japanese imbrications of modernist literature, criticism, and philology, this draft chapter argues for a rereading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy that emphasizes Nietzsche’s use of masks or personae—and thereby for a reconsideration of narrative person and voice in the novel theory of Gérard Genette and novels by Thomas Mann and Yukio Mishima.
The chapter begins with Mishima’s endorsement of Mann as the embodiment of a post-romantic novel tradition opposing “art” to “life” and traces back to Nietzsche, the major reference point for both writers. Nietzsche, working in discourses of post-Kantian aesthetics and Schopenhauerian metaphysics, uses an analysis of masks in the tragedy genre to theorize and dramatize the relation between “the world of appearances” and a quasi-artistic “will.” I argue that he places special focus on the very process of mask-making as active and temporal.
Mann both picks up on this aspect and makes “Nietzsche” one of several masks for his own narrative theory. Mann’s privileging of the voice of the narrator as the “ensoulment” of its characters leads me to a reconsideration of the antinomies of homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratorial voice in Genette’s theory.
In the second half of the chapter, I read Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947) and Mishima’s Sea of Fertility (1969-71) as novels that work with the abovementioned issues through the peculiar device of personifying the antinomy of Genette’s two positions as a friendship between protagonist and narrator.

The event will take place in person in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall on Thursday, April 21th, from 5-7pm.

We are very excited to announce the the Working Group on Narrative's second event of the Fall quarter. Cynthia Laura Vialle-Giancotti, PhD candidate in Italian and French Literature, will present her paper Eighteenth Century Literary Portraits: The Repurposing of a Seventeenth-Century Socialite Practice.

Christophe Schuwey, Assistant Professor of French at Yale University will offer a response.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday November 17th via a hybrid format, both in-person in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall and through Zoom. Light refreshments will be provided for in-person attendees.

Cynthia has kindly provided an abstract of her paper below. This is the link to register in advance. Those who wish to read Cynthia’s paper before the session should request the PDF by contacting Allie Gamble (algamble@stanford.edu).

Abstract: In this article I move away from the traditional approach to the Enlightenment as a break from past practices and traditions. Using recent research on description in the late 17th-century and in the Enlightenment, I consider instead the ways in which 18th-century novelists borrowed and repurposed 17th-century practices.
I examine specifically the ways in which 18th-century authors appropriated the 17th-century socialite portrait and recast it to fit the new genre of the fictional memoirs.This repurposing transformed what had been an eminently social practice - depicting real people with an encomiastic and extradiegetic objective in mind - into a solely literary practice, depicting fictional characters with a proleptic and intradiegetic objective in mind. In the first part of the article I initially survey what I have called the ‘vestiges’ of the 17th-century socialite portrait in 18th-century literary writings. I do so by investigating the discrepancies between dictionary definitions of portraits and actual novelistic practices, then by exploring the 18th-century rich discourse on portraits, composed of a persistent animosity and a continuously reiterated requirement of resemblance.
In the second part of the article I move beyond the vestiges of the socialite portrait to interrogate the ways in which portraits supported fictional memoirs’ truth postures. The analysis of prefatory discourses, of portraits themselves and of diegetic ambiguity in fictional memoirs will help illustrate my argument.
The goal of this article is ultimately to highlight the ways in which literary portraits, a traditionally discarded genre, play a role in the formation of 18th-century fiction.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Allie Gamble (algamble@stanford.edu)
Ido Keren (ikeren@stanford.edu)
Casey Patterson (caseyp@stanford.edu)
Alex Sherman (ajsherm@stanford.edu)

The Working Group on Narrative is delighted to host Andrea Capra, PhD candidate in Italian, presenting Structural Horror: Curzio Malaparte and Primo Levi, a chapter from his dissertation Deforming Modernity: The Experience of Horror in Italian Literature.

Joshua Landy, Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Comparative Literature and, by courtesy, of English at Stanford University will act as respondent.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday November 3rd, at 5PM in the Terrace Room and Patio in Margaret Jacks Hall. The event will be held in person, in adherence with university and county protocols regarding social distancing and safety during the pandemic. As a result food will be served outdoors on the Terrace from 5 to 5:30, followed by the discussion from 5:30 to 7pm.

Andrea has kindly provided an abstract of his dissertation below. Those who wish to read Structural Horror before the session should request the PDF by contacting Allie Gamble (algamble@stanford.edu).

Deforming Modernity: The Experience of Horror in Italian Literature
Abstract: This dissertation studies horror as a form of experience and its aesthetics in works of modern Italian literature not belonging to the horror genre. My phenomenology of horror detaches it from the monstrous, the supernatural, and gore, to reconnect it to lived experience and show how it can erupt into a life despite modernity’s claims of safety and control. I argue that horror is underpinned by contextual and contingent elements: a corpse is not horrifying for an autopsist at work. Featured are works from Giacomo Leopardi, Carlo Michelstaedter, Luigi Pirandello, Curzio Malaparte, Primo Levi, Anna Maria Ortese, Tommaso Landolfi, Igiaba Scego, and Elena Ferrante.

Allie Gamble (algamble@stanford.edu)
Ido Keren (ikeren@stanford.edu)
Casey Patterson (caseyp@stanford.edu)
Alex Sherman (ajsherm@stanford.edu)

Dear colleagues,
Please join us on Friday, October 29th for the Center for the Study of the Novel’s Books at the Center event. We are delighted to welcome Peter Boxall, Professor of English at the University of Sussex, to celebrate his most recent book, The Prosthetic Imagination: A History of the Novel as Artificial Life (Cambridge UP, 2020).

Here is a short description of Prof. Boxall’s latest work:

In The Prosthetic Imagination, leading critic Peter Boxall argues that we are now entering an artificial age, in which our given bodies enter into new conjunctions with our prosthetic extensions. This new age requires us to reimagine our relation to our bodies, and to our environments, and Boxall suggests that the novel as a form can guide us in this imaginative task. Across a dazzling range of prose fictions, from Thomas More's Utopia to Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, Boxall shows how the novel has played a central role in forging the bodies in which we extend ourselves into the world. But if the novel has helped to give our world a human shape, it also contains forms of life that elude our existing human architectures: new amalgams of the living and the non-living that are the hidden province of the novel imagination. These latent conjunctions, Boxall argues, are preserved in the novel form, and offer us images of embodied being that can help us orient ourselves to our new prosthetic condition.

Ian Duncan (English, University of California, Berkeley), and Nancy Ruttenburg (English, Stanford) will serve as respondents to Professor Boxall.

The event will take place via Zoom on Friday October 29th at 12pm (PST). This is the link to register in advance. Those who wish to read The Prosthetic Imagination’s introduction and chapter “Prosthetic Worlds” before the session should request the PDF by contacting Allie Gamble (algamble@stanford.edu).

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. His research has focused on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in modernist and contemporary writing, and more recently on the longer history of the novel. He has written books on Samuel Beckett, on Don DeLillo, and several books on the novel, including Twenty-First Century Fiction and The Value of the Novel. Professor Boxall has also edited a range of work - including a collection on Beckett's politics, entitled Beckett/Aesthetics/Politics, a collection on poetry, entitled Thinking Poetry, and 1001 Books you Must Read Before you Die. He is also co-editor of Volume 7 of the Oxford History of the Novel, editor of the book series Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture, and editor of the UK journal Textual Practice. He is currently writing a book on the twentieth-century novel and the decline of the west, entitled Fictions of the West.

Ian Duncan is Professor and Florence Green Bixby Chair in English at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge, 1992), Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007), and most recently Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution (Princeton, 2019). He is currently writing a short book on Scotland and Romanticism. Duncan is a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a member of the editorial board of Representations, a General Editor of the Collected Works of James Hogg, and co-editor of a new book series, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism.

Nancy Ruttenburg is Willian Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department at Stanford University. She also holds courtesy appointments in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures. Prof. Ruttenburg is the author of Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, 1998) and Dostoevsky's Democracy (Princeton, 2008), and she has recently written on the work of J. M. Coetzee and on Melville’s “Bartleby.” Books in progress include a study of secularization in the postrevolutionary United States arising out of the naturalization of “conscience” as inalienable right, entitled Conscience, Rights, and The Delirium of Democracy; and a comparative work entitled Dostoevsky And, for which the Russian writer serves as a lens on the historical development of a set of intercalated themes in the literature of American modernity.

This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome, and we hope to see you there!

Allie Gamble (algamble@stanford.edu)
Ido Keren (ikeren@stanford.edu)
Casey Patterson (caseyp@stanford.edu)
Alex Sherman (ajsherm@stanford.edu)

Dear Colleagues,  

Please join the Center for the Study of the Novel on Friday, May 14th at 10:00 AM PST for our final event of the academic year: Anti-Racist Pedagogies of the Novel. We will be receiving papers from three distinguished guest scholars:

Chris Freeburg is the John A. and Grace W. Nicholson Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His books Melville and the Idea of Blackness (2012) and Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life (2017) treat the moral and existential task of navigating race in American cultural history. His most recent book, Counterlife (2020) extends these questions to theories of social life and social death in grappling with the legacies of slavery.

Achille Mbembe is a philosopher, political scientist, and professor in the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg. His books On the Postcolony (2001), A Critique of Black Reason (2016), and Necropolitics (2019) provide indispensable frames for conducting work in postcolonial studies and Black studies in the 21st century.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is a professor of Literacy, Culture, and International Education at the University of Pennsylvania, and will soon assume an appointment at the University of Michigan. Her work attends to the representation of people of color in young adult and children’s literature, and her book The Dark Fantastic (2019) attends to reader responses of entrenched racial symbolism present in science fiction and fantasy genre conventions.

We are looking forward to this ever-timely reconsideration of our teaching practices, and hope you will join us. 

The event will take place via Zoom, on May 14th at 10AM PST. This is the link to register advance, and this is the link to our website for more information. 

The event is free and open to the public.

Join us on Friday, April 30th for the “Crime Narratives” event at the Center for the Study of the Novel. We are delighted to welcome Andrea Goulet, Professor of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, Michelle Robinson, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina, and Héctor Hoyos, Associate Professor and Director, Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. 

Andrea Goulet: 

The Yellow and the Black:  Policing the Street in Modern French Crime Fiction

Gérard Delteil’s 2019 Les Écœurés bills itself as “le premier polar en gilet jaune,” the first crime novel to cross police investigation with the worker-led movement that recently made headlines in France.  My talk takes Delteil’s yellow-vest noiras the starting-point for an analysis of the city street as site of intersection for private crimes and public insurrection, local policing and State intervention.  By adapting a tradition that goes back to 19th-century street-name mysteries, the automotive noirs of the 20th and 21st centuries tug at the formal limits of the detective genre in order to reflect on urbanist violence and national unrest.

Michelle Robinson

Open Doors, Hung Juries, and Lucid Dreams in Mark Twain’s “Which Was It?”

Twain’s unfinished crime novel and dream-experiment “Which Was It?” (1899-1903) is best known for its most formidable invention: Jasper, a Black ex-slave who discovers incriminating evidence with which he extorts money from George Harrison, a highly respected white property owner in a strange hamlet called Indiantown. This paper argues that Jasper’s peculiar “reparations project” belongs to a larger geopolitical enterprise that reaches across the Pacific Ocean and into the China market. I track Twain’s efforts to chart the course of the U.S. expansionist project in this crime fiction; I also hint at how Pauline Hopkins got the genre right.

Héctor Hoyos 

The Moral Revolution to Come: Chronicle of a Death Foretold and the Law of Honor

Gabriel García Márquez’s 1981 genre-bending crime novella has been both widely read and widely misread. In this revision, I analyze the book’s portrayal of the emergence of a “narrativity of the law” (Brooks) capable of overcoming honor killing through affect. The talk branches out from a co-authored monograph in progress on the unarticulated legal doctrine present in the author’s oeuvre.

The event will take place via Zoom, on April 30th at 12pm (PST). This is the link to register in advance. 

This event is free and open to the public. All are welcome, and we hope to see you there!  

We are delighted to have at the Working Group on the Novel Maciej Kurzynski, PhD candidate in the East Asian Languages and Cultures and recipient of the Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship, presenting “On the Technology of the Sublime in Modern Chinese Narratives”. 

Robert Clewis, Professor of Philosophy at Gwynedd Mercy University and recent editor of The Sublime Reader (2018) with Bloomsbury, will be his respondent. We are very grateful for his participation in our workshop, especially since he is in Italy at the moment. 

The workshop will take place on October 27th, at 10AM, to accomodate the different time zones. Here is the registration link.  

For the pdf of the article, please contact cinziag@stanford.edu.

Title: On the Technology of the Sublime in Modern Chinese Narratives

Abstract: In my paper, I use the tools of digital humanities to explore the aesthetic of the sublime in modern Chinese narratives. I argue that, due to its ability to provoke strong bodily responses, the sublime is often appropriated by processes of sense-making and value judgements in order to address the human mind affectively. The aim of my paper is thus to shed light on what I call the “technology of the sublime,” which is a narrative strategy that organizes topological leaps between the sublime and other topics in the narrative space. Using topic modeling in tandem with network analysis, I read two modern Chinese novels: The Second Sun by Liu Baiyu (1987) and Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (1990) and reveal how their authors avail themselves of the sublime in order to make performative statements about the world. I also show the ways in which the authors can negotiate with the sublime meta-narratively so as to contain and redirect its powerful emotive thrust. 

Respondent: Diana Looser, Assistant Professor in Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford

My dissertation is on the subject of embodied Dominican world-making. I look at contemporary fiction by Dominican and Dominican-American writers and conduct ethnographic fieldwork at dance academies and social dance sites in the United States and the Dominican Republic in order to examine how Dominicans envision and enact alternative pasts, presents, and futures. I argue that the desiring body is the crucial mode through which worlds are made across both literature and dance. I consider these texts and ethnographic encounters through a phenomenological lens in order to examine the distinct configurations of this desiring body, and therefore the different kinds of possibilities it engenders, in fiction and social dance respectively. 

Respondent: Elizabeth Kessler, American Studies, Stanford University

Abstract of the Dissertation Project: 

The late nineteenth century saw the development of astrophotography, with its blurred capture of the moon, then constellations, then points invisible to the naked eye. In 1880 Henry Draper (whose father was first to photograph both the moon and a human face) made cloudy images of the Orion Nebula. In this chapter ("Star") I read Draper alongside the scientist and artist Étienne Léopold Trouvelot and the African-American quilter Harriet Powers. Trouvelot, infamous for introducing an invasive species of moth to North America, made color illustrations of telescope views through the 1870s and 80s, published by C. Scribner’s Sons in 1882 as The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings, gorgeous but made almost immediately obsolete by astrophotography. Powers’ Pictorial Quilt (1898), one of two surviving pieces by the artist, records meteorological and astronomical events: the dark day of May 19, 1780, the falling of the stars on November 13, 1833, Cold Thursday, February 10, 1895, and the red light night of 1846. Many of these are sewn not from personal but collective memory; Powers was born into slavery in 1837. This chapter considers how description might represent the past, or time, at both a cosmic and more human scale.

Respondent: Margaret Cohen, Professor of English, Stanford 

“Sounding; or, Recovering the Role of Touch in Antebellum Seascapes”

Article Abstract: 

This article explores the motif of sounding in Antebellum maritime literature, and more specifically in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville. I posit that, before it became a psychological metaphor, sounding was first and foremost a nautical practice which was tackled as such in maritime literature. It was the maneuver that sailors performed when vision proved insufficient to navigate safely. I propose to recuperate the sense of touch in this motif as it brings into play sailors who feel, surfaces that are felt, and lead lines that make the sailors feel – and feel their way along the coast. I contend that sounding, in Antebellum texts, is a form of contact and encounter with the landscape, but also a relational mode of knowledge.

Through the reading of texts by Cooper, Dana and Melville, this article seeks to explore how sounding has been developed in maritime fiction as an alternative mode of knowledge, different yet complementary to vision. The first two parts on J.F. Cooper’s The Pilot (1824) and R.H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) analyze how sounding enables these two authors to reflect upon alternative political and social foundation through the tactile performance of sounding. Parts 3 and 4 focus on Melville’s Redburn (1849) and Cooper’s The Crater (1847) and question, along with these texts, the limits of sounding as a mode of knowledge-production that would give access to some deep truth. Published in the late 1840s, Melville’s and Cooper’s texts suggest that the depths plummeted by the lead line may not be that deep after all, and the knowledge they give access to may well be doomed to remain superficial knowledge.

Registration Link:

https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYrd-GorjgrG9JWP9sISEPBVWO6bGVB4urC

Respondent: Lisa Surwillo, Associate Professor of ILAC, Stanford

“Tú lo que quieres es gozar:” collectionism, self-fashioning, and the historical consciousness of franco-colombian decadence.”

In this chapter, I study two major decadent novels: José Asunción Silva’s De sobremesa [After-dinner Conversation] and Joris-Karl Huysmans’ A rebours [Against Nature]. Therein, I seek to describe how these two novels’ meticulous representations of art collections, aesthetic judgements, and aesthetic experiences give rise to desirable projections of a national past (Huysmans) and a regional future (Silva). I also show that the appeal of these projections depends on the kind of individuality that the practice of collecting artworks and luxury objects is meant to produce. In A rebours, singularity and autonomy are the goal of Des Esseintes’ self-regulated aesthetic experiences. In De sobremesa, José Fernández seeks integrity—the unification of his divided self—through his artistic, commercial, and amorous pursuits. In neither case, however, is the singular, autonomous, and integrated individual valued for its own sake. Rather, these achievements of self-fashioning draw their normative force from medical discourses on national decline and regional backwardness. Thus, De sobremesa and A rebours represent different dimensions of artistic activity as a means to imagining alternative historical narratives for France and Latin America.

Register in advance for this meeting: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAvdOyprjIiH9Cz1XZ8aFXlourR_W_WXBgZ

Respondent: Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Professor and chair of LGBT Studies at CCSF

Paper abstract

Drawing from queer theory – in particular, Halberstam’s queer time and Muñoz’s utopian futurity – this paper discusses the dichotomous interplay between Freemasonry and domestic life as presented in two late nineteenth-century Russian novels: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) and Aleksei Feofilaktovich Pisemskii’s lesser-known Masons (1880).  Although they are, as it would seem, the only two Russian works from their time to explicitly feature Freemason rituals and principles, to date there has been no large-scale, systematic comparison of those texts.  In an effort to amend that, I focus on their depictions of ritualized entries into the two aforementioned institutions –initiations (Freemasonry) and marriages (domesticity) – with particular attention to participants’ bodies and genders. I find that the novels’ literary Freemasonry – through its capacity to forge distinct communities and subjects – represents a space which 1) nurtures deviations from socially-enforced gender attributes and linear benchmarks (e.g. marriage, child-rearing) and instead 2) lets characters galvanize, develop, and embody distilled versions of themselves outside such frameworks.  Tolstoy’s Pierre Bezukhov and Pisemskii’s Susana Nikolaevna both enter Freemasonry after experiencing disruptions in the domestic sphere. Tolstoy places the former strictly outside the latter, whereas Pisemskii and his female, Freemason protagonist collapse the two; despite those differences, in both authors’ works, Freemasonry nonetheless emerges as a site with queer potential in its suspension and/or subversion of the primacy – and telos – of the domestic.