On Thursday, October 30 from 4:30-6pm in Harper 145, we welcome Rachel Kyne. Along with serving as co-coordinator for the workshop this quarter, Rachel is is a 5th Year PhD student in English, working on a dissertation provisionally titled “Stuck in Time: Modernist Momentums.” She gives a short description of her dissertation below, as well as a bit about the paper we’ll be reading (the paper is available here–email Marcy or Rachel for the password).

We hope you will join us for the discussion and the Halloween-themed snacks!

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My dissertation examines historical experiences and literary figurations of an ongoing present that never gives way to a future—a temporality of mere continuation or stuckness in time. This temporality presents a problem for modernism in theory and in practice, since modernism is generally associated by its practitioners and later critics with explosive, visible forms of temporalization and rubrics like speed, simultaneity, acceleration, and shock. So the project is about the problem of narrating history, in a sense, when historical progression seems to grind to a halt, as many felt it had in the Great War. But it’s also about the narrative challenge of conveying a kind of recursive continuity without progress, or duration without eventfulness—whether individual or social. And overall, it’s about the selective response of modernism to a temporality of chronicity and stuckness, which seem to refuse the futural orientation and attraction to novelty that so characterizes aesthetic modernism.

In my first chapter, which I present in incomplete form here, I argue that World War I constituted an important global introduction to stuckness in time as a shared, temporal possibility, experienced by trench soldiers under quite literal conditions of spatial immobility. The chapter investigates the relations between the compelled endurance demanded of trench soldiers and non-combatants, the narrative problem of eventless continuation, and the formal strategies of both ‘traditional’ war memoirists and ‘modernist’ writers. The chapter ends with a consideration of narrative framings of postwar experience, looking at contemporary articulations of trauma & repetition (Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle) and the massive cultural project of trying to move on and ‘arrive’ at a recovered future.

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.