Autumn 2021

October 4, 2021, 5–6:30 PM: “James Baldwin’s High Cultural Pluralism.” Author: Joel Rhone (PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago). Respondent: Sophia Azeb (Assistant Professor of English, University of Chicago). This paper pushes against prevailing critical tendencies to emphasize exile and expatriation in James Baldwin’s essays. It argues that those he published before 1960—and mainly through New York intellectual magazines—were intimately connected to the burgeoning regimes of racial representation that took shape at the start of the Cold War. Taking up Baldwin’s autobiographical writing, cultural criticism, and review essays, this paper discusses the pronounced investment in African-American particularity that Baldwin brought to bear on the thin appeals to cultural distinction and aesthetic innovation that circulated among state and cultural institutions through the first full decade of the postwar period. The paper marks this moment as a flashpoint for contemporary identitarianism and its institutional uptake throughout the late twentieth century.

October 18,2021, 5–6:30 PM: “Night Effects: Decadent Poetics and Anti-Colonial Critique in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Essay Anthology, Art and Swadeshi (1910).” Author: Jacob Harris (Humanities Teaching Fellow in English, University of Chicago). Respondent: Nasser Mufti (Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois Chicago). The Anglo-Ceylonese (present day Sri Lankan) scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy is celebrated, largely by art historians, for his many treatises that champion Indian art and its possibilities to serve the project of anti-colonial resistance and Indian nationalism more broadly. The originator of the term “postindustrial,” he is a major figure in the transnational movement against the ravages of Victorian-style industrialization formed at the nexus of Indian anti-colonial aesthetic and political discourse, and the Anglo-American arts and crafts movement. This paper attends to the overlooked influence of fin-de-siècle Decadent poetics on his scholarship, especially in his early essay anthology, Art and Swadeshi, arguing that Coomaraswamy’s mobilization of decadent poetics registers a critical ambivalence about nationalism—one that resists his explicit advocacy for the nationalist project, and exemplifies a more radical approach to the relationship between art and politics.

November 1, 2021, 5–6:30 PM: “Anemoia Listening: Nostalgia, Fantasy, and Despair.” Author: Joseph Maurer (Humanities Teaching Fellow in Music, University of Chicago). Respondent: Amy Skjerseth (PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago). This paper theorizes present-day youth listening practices through the concept of “anemoia listening”—characterized by fantasy and pseudo-nostalgic longing for something the listeners have never experienced. Through case studies of pirate chanteys and synthwave, I argue that these niche yet diverse online music spaces illuminate the limits to imagination and the sense of decline endemic to the current youth generation.

November 16, 2021, 5–6:30 PM: “Comedy, Horror, and Aspect Choreography in Patrick Brice’s Creep (2014).”
Author: Kirsten Ihns, (PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago). Respondent: TBD. Abstract: This chapter draft looks at how Creep (2014), a comedy-horror/found footage style film, choreographs its viewer through relatively discrete modes of genred receptivity. How do patterns of irreconcilable relational orientation in this film inflect its affective possibilities, and how does this switching meet the problem of web 2.0 irony, which Damon Young characterizes as a kind of destabilized and irresolvable oscillation between sincerity and irony? How do the film’s patterned and abstract “shocks” of genre-switch sit in relation to what Tom Gunning describes as the shock-oriented “cinema of attraction”  of the late 19th century? Working to situate the object’s aspect-choreographic form in relation to metamodernist and postmodernist aesthetic problems, this chapter tries to better understand how artworks in the contemporary landscape might process their situation as an immanent problem of form.

December 6, 2021, 5–6:30 PM: “‘that elegant sodom in the garden of England’: Vita Sackville-West, Derek Jarman, and the Epistolary Circuits of Queer Gardens.” Author: Sarah McDaniel (PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago). Respondent: Lee Jasperse (PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago). This chapter draft constellates a trajectory of queer correspondence and life-writing surrounding the 1928 publication of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography, with a particular interest in exploring – and theorizing – a queer praxis of spatialized life-writing. In bringing together queer botanical scenes (the gardens of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst; Derek Jarman’s gardens at Prospect Cottage), more conventionally ‘literary’ auto/biographical and coterie writings (Woolf, Sackville-West, and Nicolson’s correspondences; Jarman’s journals), and episodes of transtemporal encounter (Jarman at Sissinghurst in 1988; Sackville-West republishing a scene from Orlando in 1945), the chapter argues that a spatially attuned approach to life-writing – and an expansion of its categories to include the spatial – can transform our understanding of the social potentialities of life-writing practice.

Winter 2022

January 11: “Believing in Life After Auto-Tune: From a Gimmick to a Gambit for Creativity.” Author: Amy Skjerseth (PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago). Respondent: Michael Kinney, PhD Candidate in Musicology, Stanford University. Co-sponsored with Theater and Performance Studies Workshop. Critics and musicians have derided Auto-Tune as inauthentic and unnatural since its inception. Exaggerated uses of Auto-Tune, popularized by Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe,” have cast pitch correction as antithetical to vocal expression and ability—technology that effaces one’s “true” voice. Since singers don’t have to be in tune and can even use Auto-Tune live, critics often call it a gimmick. Auto-Tune exemplifies Sianne Ngai’s capitalist aesthetic category of the gimmick in its attractive-yet-repulsive promise to save time and labor (2020): it at once works too much and too little, is too backward but also too futuristic. This chapter-in-progress examines music videos by Cher and 100 gecs to dissect Auto-Tune’s complex discourse as a gimmick—and to show its status as a fundamentally audio-visual phenomenon. (After all, visual contours are integral to Auto-Tune’s waveform-tuning algorithm, which derived from deep-sea oil sounding techniques.) The sound of Auto-Tune is often judged on the basis of sight—whether the singer’s voice is in tune with expected performances of their gender or race. Auto-Tune’s gendered and racialized logics have been analyzed predominately through sonic means of production and reception, but a fuller picture can be gained by studying Auto-Tune’s accompanying imagery—ads, album covers, and music videos that illustrate Auto-Tuned effects. Visual depictions of Auto-Tune reveal not only essentialized beliefs about which voices index which bodies but also ways of interpreting how pop stars are packaged into commercial personas. While media scholars are quick to show how Auto-Tune polishes “unruly” voices for easy consumption, performers like Cher and 100 gecs exhibit cracks in its icy veneer. In music videos, Cher and 100 gecs furnish visual metaphors of teleportation and pixelation. Their imagery contextualizes Auto-Tune’s contemporaneity with MTV pop personas and Y2K, and shows how Auto-Tune can transcend gimmickry to defy stereotypes of gender and genre.

January 24: “Poets Writing Prose After Broadband.” Author: Steven Maye (Humanities Teaching Fellow in English, University of Chicago). Respondent: Maria Dikcis, Postdoctoral Researcher and Mass Incarceration & Policing Fellow, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, University of Chicago. This article is an attempt to characterize the recent microgenre of book-length prose works, written by poets, that also incorporate photographs. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely and Tan Lin’s Insomnia and the Aunt were the major examples in the dissertation chapter, but there are many others, and I’m hoping to deal with more of them as I rework the chapter into an article. The gist of the argument is that these poets appeal to both prose and photography because those genres give them better resources for inhabiting the paradox of a collective point of view. In the cases of Lin and Rankine, I materialize this contemporary vision of collectivity by showing how each of their books rewrites the form and stylistic norms of Wikipedia, which mandates that its contributors write and revise its articles in a way that produce “a neutral point of view.”

January 31: “Translation, Amukh, and the All-India League for Revolutionary Culture.” Author: Abhishek Bhattacharyya (PhD candidate in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, and Anthropology). Respondent: Chris Taylor, Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago. In this chapter I argue that the Hindi “little magazine” Amukh (Preface, 1965-2004) inaugurated new cross-regional debates about caste and cultural form in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside original work, Amukh published translations of Naxalite (radical left) writing from several South Asian languages over the decades. The whole print run of the publication, located after a multi-city search, and digitised with a grant I was awarded, constitutes an incomparable and previously unexplored archive of Naxalite literature. Many of the authors first published in Amukh would only decades later be translated into other languages and achieve broader recognition. My chapter proceeds through close readings of some Telugu and Bangla works, alongside their Hindi translations. In particular, I explore how songs composed by Telugu Dalit (those excluded from caste-Hindu society) composers came to be increasingly translated from the late 1980s onwards, challenging the relatively upper-caste dominated realm of Telugu poetry. At the same time, there was no comparable influx of subaltern writers in the Bangla pieces translated: a lack that stood out sharply in the contrast, provoking discussion. By bringing literature from different languages and regions into conversation, with their varied histories of anti-caste struggle, Amukh provoked debates that had significant consequences for radical literary work across several Indian languages. In the 1980s the magazine’s editor Kanchan Kumar also became centrally involved in forming the All-India League for Revolutionary Culture, whose office bearers were all people who had figured in Amukh’s pages. Combining literary analyses and archival research with ethnographic work talking to different participants in these overlapping projects, I illuminate the crucial role of translation in generating both leftist organisational spaces and cross-regional literary debates in India.

February 21: “Aesthetics of Intellectual Property.” Author: Zoe Smith (PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago). Respondent: Adrienne Brown, Associate Professor of English, University of Chicago. “The Aesthetics of Intellectual Property” is the first chapter in my dissertation examining the ontological status of storyworlds. The storyworld is often restricted to the realm of reader experience, the “mental map” constituted through interpretation. The main goal of the project is to demonstrate that the storyworld has a solidity and vitality that persists beyond the minds of readers. In “Aesthetics of Intellectual Property” I am attempting to lay out the material conditions that have made the late 20th/early 21st century such a fruitful time for the storyworld in mass media culminating in the major “universe” franchise as epitomized by the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Factors include the shift from postmodern mass culture (primarily drawing on Jameson and Baudrillard) to our current digitized mass culture environment and the expansion of trademarking within intellectual property law. In the latter half of the chapter I propose two general aesthetic principles that have developed in this media/economic environment: one is derived from the rigid and controlling design philosophy Walt Disney conceived for his Disneyland parks, and the other is made possible by the monopolization of media and the attendant accumulation of a massive assortment of intellectual property rights under the ownership of a smaller and smaller number of media empires (i.e. Space Jam 2).

March 7: “Collision Detection, Interpenetration, and Sexuality in Video Games.” Author: Arianna Gass (PhD Candidate in English/Theater and Performance Studies, University of Chicago). Co-sponsored with the Digital Media Workshop. Respondent: Amanda Phillips, Assistant Professor of English and Film/Media Studies at Georgetown University. This chapter starts by considering the computational process of collision detection, which is fundamental to all physical modeling in games, and its underlying logic that seeks to prevent discrete and bounded bodies from interpenetrating, or “clipping.” My analysis shifts to moments of intentional and unintentional interpenetration in video games that depict sexual acts. This study takes some inspiration from Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s essay “Beyond Shooting and Eating…” which thinks about collision detection through a history of the metaphors associated with this operational logic. His work is a reminder that collision detection became a processual metonym for physical attacks, opening doors, and picking up items – all actions that exceed what we would describe as “touching” outside of the video game context. My first case study focuses on Honey Select Unlimited (Illusion, 2016), a Japanese pornographic video game (eroge) released for Western audiences, to illustrate how the phenomena of “clipping” both reveals and subtly critiques the game’s representations of (compulsory) heterosexuality. “Clipping” is a symptom of the software ontology that separates the skin of the three-dimensional game object from its underlying mesh. I also explore the simulated proximity and intimacy of Summer Lesson (Bandai Namco, 2016), a title exclusively released for the PlayStation VR, and the resulting online viral challenge to “upskirt” the non-player character. This challenge forces players to negotiate the simulated 3D graphical world, exploiting collision detection algorithms for its consummation.

Spring 2022

April 4: “Who Writes the Good Soldier? Inscription, Obfuscation, and Intention at the End of Impressionism.” Author: Thomas D. Moore, PhD Candidate in English, University of Illinois at Chicago. Respondent: Kenneth Warren, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor in English, University of Chicago. Failing to recognize Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford’s single-minded fixation on the materiality of writing, the early reviewers who first applied the label of “impressionism” to the works of these artists initiated a misunderstanding that has dogged literary historians and critics for over a century. What distinguishes the English-language literary impressionism practiced from 1892 through 1914 isn’t what it borrows from the French visual arts movement. Rather, the unifying theoretical concern of this small but influential school of fiction writers centers around the problem of writing (with pen and ink on paper) securing the conditions of meaning. Their novels and short stories manifest this fixation through innovative narrative techniques that self-consciously displace the literal author and also through figurative depictions of the act and scene of writing (such as the upturned face master trope) designed to simultaneously show and conceal writing’s materiality. This concept of impressionism, first articulated by Michael Fried in the 1980s, is theorized across the entirety of Ford’s  The Good Soldier (1915)—a singular novel that stages the violent conflict inherent to the impressionist dual imperative to both present and obfuscate the movement’s theoretical commitments simultaneously. The Good Soldier thematizes the impressionist project by depicting two embedded author- proxies—one responsible for its form (the manifest writer figure, Dowell) and the other responsible for its content (Dowell’s overlooked co-author, Leonora)—and then allegorizes the movement’s exhaustion through replacing the active, intentional arranger of content (Leonora) with a catatonic, intentionless figure of bare literality (Nancy). As the final work of literary impressionism, The Good Soldier holds a unique position in literary history. By exhausting his movement’s formal problematic, Ford cleared a path for the modernists to succeed him.

April 25: “Tact: Agons of Aesthetic Judgment in Henry James and Nella Larsen.” Author: Ricky Monday, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago. Respondent: Pardis Dabashi, Assistant Professor in English, University of Nevada, Reno.

May 2: “The Sociology of the ‘Coon Song,'” Author: Andrei Pohorelsky, PhD candidate in Music. Respondent: Travis Jackson, Associate Professor in Music, University of Chicago. At the turn of the twentieth century, the composers and lyricists of Tin Pan Alley worked frantically to service a craze for “coon songs”. These songs are now mostly forgotten, and for good reason—in addition to being unabashedly racist, they typically consisted of insipid variations on a handful of grotesque formulae. But this ugly repertory requires closer scrutiny than it has so far received—for as the main conveyor of ragtime rhythms into mass consciousness, it forms a crucial moment in the development of American popular music. While scholars have tended to regard these songs as an unfortunate residue of blackface minstrelsy, this chapter asserts their (equally unfortunate) timeliness. Departing slightly from Ammen (2017), Radano (200), and Dormon (1988)—each of whom read the “coon song” as a technology of post-Reconstruction white supremacy—I emphasize the utility of racial stereotype for rendering and directing the social transformations of the emerging industrial order. Songs like “If Time Were Money I’d Be a Millionaire” and “It Makes No Difference What You Do, Get The Money” offered competing views on leisure and work ethic, while “Just Come Up and Take Your Presents Back” weighed the imperatives of courtship against the value of consumer goods, and “The Wedding of the Chinee and the Coon” imagined the amalgamations that might come from America’s new polyglot metropolises. In hearing the travails of the “coons”, a new mass audience worked through the conflicting value systems of consumerist hedonism, bourgeois propriety, racial hierarchy, and heterosexual romance. And in singing along, they invented and claimed a musical discourse with which to assert themselves, mock their social betters, and ridicule those kept violently outside the ranks of civil society. Through a “distant” reading of over a hundred songs, as well as closer readings of select songs and media sources, I uncover the semantic and musical tropes that characterized the genre for creators and consumers. Ultimately—aided by the interventions of Stuart Hall and Étienne Balibar—I argue that the “coon song” helped to articulate a new middle class, and taught them how to be white.

May 16, “Living with the Great Number: Squatters, Participants, and the Unknown Extra,” Author: Tim DeMay, PhD Candidate in English, University of Chicago. Respondent: Stephen Maye, Humanities Teaching Fellow in English, University of Chicago. What is the social when perceived from the social’s absolute margins? Asking this question invokes a number of possible answers that depend on the scale of a given social: belonging and participation shift and take on new resonances in an individual squat, for example, versus a squatter colony, versus a nation. By focusing on squatting and squatter settlements to explore artistic participation, housing politics, and conceptions of the social (and even the nation), I ultimately argue for a model of community formation based on the Surrealist game of the exquisite corpse. This first involves drawing out some of the shared features of various types of squats, combining sociological studies with personal visits to squats across France, which help establish a primary tension between a desire for social autonomy and designs that attempt to operate at scale: preserving autonomy limits the scale of housing interventions, and vice-versa. The exquisite corpse, introduced first through the Japanese form of the renga, incorporates multiple individual contributions into a coherent but ultimately unlimited whole, or rather, it is an n+1 form that is always able to accumulate and add. I use the exquisite corpse and the Open Form theory of Polish architect Oskar Hansen to consider ways of privilegingthe individual within the group. Specifically, I read the 2000 film Mysterious Object at Noon by Thai filmmaker ApichatpongWeerasethakul. Built as a modification of the exquisite corpse, this film sketches a counter cartographic map of Thailand, emphasizing blue-collar and rural voices from the traditionally poor northern regions. At the same time, the film highlights the creative and productive powers of the fold, a structure of the exquisite corpse that blinds the participant (and organizer) to what has come before while the participant makes their own contribution. I see in the fold a larger, institutional critique and possibility and use it to put forward the concept of “institutional blindness” as a tactic to allow for spaces where institutions and states retreat from direct control. I follow this more practical tactic with a symbolic one, expanding the n+1 aspect of the exquisite corpse to encourage the acknowledgment of the “ethnographic remainder,” or the additional other who might be unseen, in representations of the social. The ethnographic remainder is in this sense an attempted revision of imaginary communities that incorporates fallibility and humility in our senses of community.

May 30, “You’re Going To Like This: Having Enough as Being Liked, 1977–2021.” Author: Lily Scherlis, PhD Candidate in English/Theater and Performance Studies, University of Chicago.  Respondent: Michael Dango, Assistant Professor of English at Beloit College.This paper is about wanting to be liked. I look at how this ridiculed social strategy mediated changes in financial markets and labor between the 80s and early 00s. For a particular sociological type (bourgeois white women around the US film industry since the mid-1980s), “being liked” was a particularly prevalent synecdoche for social achievement. My case studies, selected to highlight a link between social liking, labor, and finance, include the development of Sally Field’s public persona from her 1985 Oscars acceptance speech to a televised Charles Schwab investment advising advertisement (2000), and the labor of Nicole Kidman’s character in the Lars von Trier film Dogville (2003), among other people whose job it is to produce a compelling persona for commercial circulation. My readings attend to how their bodies mediate the mood swings of financial markets and the development of the figure of the national economy, as their personas are used as sites of financial speculation. These figures want a public to look at them and make a snappy, lightweight, positive assessment of their everyday performances of self. Ultimately this paper aims to formulate an alternative heuristic for personality’s entanglement in contemporary capitalism: studying the desire to be liked offers unique conceptual leverage to push beyond theories of the commodification of personality (Boltanski and Chiapello) and the symbolic capital model (Bourdieu). As these theorists and others convincingly argue, dominant logics of personality structure labor conditions well beyond the realm of celebrity.