This Thursday, we welcome Amanda Davis, PhD candidate in English. Amanda will share with us a chapter from her dissertation, entitled “Embodying Animation: Genres of Literary Architecture in American Fiction.”
Amanda writes: “The overall project might be described as a literary history of Ian Hacking’s “Neo-Cartesianism” or Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology, for I am interested in fiction that invests inanimate structures with animated effects—structures like gothic houses, locked rooms, homes of tomorrow, and fixer-uppers. The current chapter argues that if modernist minimalism demands that form follows function, American haunted house fiction depicts forms warped by their ghostly content. A way to conceptualize this chapter, then, might be as offering a non-functionalist narrative about descriptive language in literary modernism. I call this warped relation between surface and content an asymmetrical relation—superficial forms produce ghostly effects that overwhelm or warp the very forms that originated them. The historical bound from Henry James to Mark Z. Danielewski, I argue, shows the latter to be working in an ongoing experiment in animating or moving to life the non-referential subjectivity of fictional characters.”
Chalcedony Wilding (English) will serve as respondent.
The meeting will take place in Harper 145 on Thursday, October 16 from 4:30-6pm. Come for the snacks, and stay for the discussion!
The pre-circulated paper is available here–please email Marcy (mcpierson@uchicago.edu), Rachel (rykyne@uchicago.edu), or Aleks (ampri@uchicago.edu) for the password.