May 2nd | Andrew Schlager on “Jean Toomer’s Aisles: Pedagogy and Performance.”
Please Join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop
Thursday, May 2nd, on Zoom from 2:00-3:30pm CST
when
Andrew Schlager
PhD Candidate, Princeton University, Department of English
presents:
“Jean Toomer’s Aisles: Performance and Pedagogy
Image: Carma (from Cane by Jean Toomer), Martin Puryear, 2000
Description: For theater makers at varying historical junctures, understanding their medium as especially pedagogical has redeemed or defended the form from charges of political quietism. While a strong reading of the social efficacy of anti-lynching dramas follows from their pedagogical aesthetics, this chapter reads a discrete cluster of cultural works from Black letters at the turn-of-the-twentieth century (by Du Bois, Julia Cooper, Weldon Johnson, and Locke) that flagrantly reverse this familiar relationship between theatricality and pedagogy. This tradition issues instead scenes of supremely disappointing, bad, or failed teaching as disquietingly theatrical. By not disavowing those affects and images of thought that go foreclosed when black classrooms are conscripted into securing the civil optimism of normative political movements, this paper tracks the dramaturgies, most exemplary in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), that fray or deflate the twinned mandates of a theater that coherently teaches. Ralph Kabins, the drunken principal fired from the Uplift school he leads, offers in the closet drama that bears his name an experimental counter-drama to the anti-lynching play, I argue. Following Autumn Womack’s call to displace the familiar mediums in lynching’s cultural memory, I theorize Toomer’s theater as estranging the location, calculation, and affects of violation for the early century anti-lynching movement.
Protected: Materials for May 22nd Session
May 22nd | Lindsay Reckson on “Viral Gestures, or How to Use Your Body at the End of the World”
Please Join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop
Monday, May 22nd, inCobb 304, from4:30-6:00pm CT
when
Lindsay Reckson
Associate Professor of English, Haverford College
presents:
“Viral Gestures, or How to Use Your Body at the End of the World”
Image: “An anonymous post-it contributed to Currently, a 2023 exhibit on capital punishment that I helped organize with artist Mark Menjívar at Haverford College. In pencil on a green post-it, written in all caps: “EXERCISE: HOLD EACH OTHER ACCOUNTABLE,” with “ACCOUNTABLE” scratched out.” – Lindsay Reckson
Description: This piece includes writing towards my book of essays in progress, Notes on Gesture. The book is a series of short essays on the ethics and politics of gesture in queer/feminist video art and performance since the mid-1960s (including works by Yvonne Rainer, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Margaret Salmon, Maria Laet, Steffani Jemison, Martine Syms, and others). In “ViralGestures,” I’m thinking through the communicability of gesture—its collective, relational form—primarily in works by Jemison and Syms. Broadly in this piece, I’m wondering whether and how Black feminist gestures produce a glitch in carceral/capitalist knowledge and visual regimes, as well as how such gestures model ongoingness in apocalyptic times.
Please reach out to the coordinators with any requests or questions about accessibility or the workshop, and we look forward to welcoming you at our meeting!
Protected: Materials for May 15th Session
May 15th | Glenn Most on “The Horrific Body in Sophocles”
Please Join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop
Monday, April 15th, in Cobb 304, from 4:30-6:00pm CT
when
Glenn Most
Visiting Professor, Classics and the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
presents:
“The Horrific Body in Sophocles”
Description: More even than the other two great Athenian tragedians, Sophocles seems to have a marked tendency to stage the suffering human body in so drastic and so effective a way as to produce emotions of profound horror in the other characters, the chorus, and presumably the audience. This article discusses the mechanisms and possible motivations for this tragic theme in all three tragedians and in the ancient theory of tragedy, but it focuses especially on Sophocles and, in Sophocles, especially on his Trachiniae and Philoctetes. Sophocles’ fascination with the horrific live human body is largely unparalleled in ancient Greek tragedy; I conclude by offering some possible explanatory hypotheses for this curious fact.
Protected: Materials for April 17th Session
April 17th | Jimmy White on “On Harmony: The Return of the Little Prince, or ‘What is it that can unite us?’”
Please Join the Affect and the Emotions Workshop
Monday, April 17th, in SSRB 401, from 4:30-6:00pm CT
when
Jimmy White
PhD Student, Classics and the Committee on Social THought, University of Chicago
presents:
“On Harmony: The Return of the Little Prince, or ‘What is it that can unite us?’”
Discussant: Rosanna Warren, Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago
Description: Perhaps in an echo of an observation made three centuries prior by Blaise Pascal (“Nous connaissons la vérité, non seulement par la raison, mais encore par le cœur”, Pensées 282), an otherworldly child—the eponymous youth of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince—learns from a wise fox that what the eye cannot discern the heart sees clearly. In this paper, through a close reading and translation of the text, I aim to appreciate this beloved tale and to consider its central lesson that the heart—so easily assumed as the seat of emotions and irrationality—is, most essentially, the lens through which one perceives rightly. Charming dialogues and beautiful illustrations shape the fictive landscape and overall encouraging tone of Le Petit Prince. Yet, this tenor of positivity is not to be confused with undemanding optimism; for Saint-Exupéry’s own experiences give expression to the story’s core disunifying emotions of loneliness, sadness, and despair. Because its words and images affect us, author of the Mary Poppins series and first-reviewer P. L. Travers notes, “in some place that is not the mind and glows there until the time comes for [one] to comprehend [them]”, Le Petit Prince enchants us to see intuitively, as Pascal phrases it; in other words, to take a leap of the imagination, to discover that what matters most can only be seen with the heart
February 27th | Rivky Mondal on “Living with Difference: Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Raven Leilani’s Luster”
The Affect and the Emotions Workshop and
the 20th & 21st Century Cultures Workshop are pleased to welcome:
Rivky Mondal
PhD Candidate, Department of English Language and Literature
“Living with Difference: Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Raven Leilani’s Luster”
Monday, February 27th from 5:00-6:30 pm
via Zoom
https://uchicago.zoom.us/j/95833912835?pwd=TnVBQnR0SUhzcWhMcFdoankwUThRZz09
with respondent Lauren Jackson, Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University
This chapter examines two fictional worlds constructed largely through female protagonists’ microsocial observations of difference. Sally Rooney’sConversations with Friends(2017) and Raven Leilani’s Luster(2020) center on the perceptions of women in their early 20s whose marginalized position enables them to see the confrontation, and contradictions, of everyday life and large-scale categories of race, gender, age, and class. I argue that Rooney and Leilani foreground both scales, and, in toggling between them, reveal points of mismatch. This non-equivalence indexes a broader crisis of making connections in the millennial novel. Citing the respective social and political consequences of this crisis in the works themselves, the chapter considers the use of super-subtle readings within neoliberalism’s political extrovertedness, an ethos marked by subjects’ far-reaching forthrightness around injustice and identity. Ultimately, I suggest that the affordances of the two novels is the aesthetic value they assign to characters’ hesitation to generalize about others and a formal design that leaves room for alterity within the diegesis.
Our meetings are open to the University of Chicago community and visitors who comply with University of Chicago vaccination requirements. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible for people with disabilities. Please direct any questions and concerns to the Affect and Emotions Workshop Coordinators, Gasira Timir (gtimir@uchicago.edu) and Bellamy Mitchell (bellamy@uchicago.edu), or the 20thand 21st Century workshop coordinators, Cassandra Lerer (crblerer@uchicago.edu) and Chris Gortmaker (cgortmaker@uchicago.edu).
Image: Lizzy Lunday, From the Clouds(2022)