Event Details

The celebrated literary theorist Professor Rita Felski (University of Virginia, USA) will speak "On Resonance." Her paper will be followed by discussion. This event will be online only and live only - it will not be recorded.

BIOG:

Rita Felski holds the John Stewart Bryan Professorship of English at the University of Virginia and Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark . She is a former editor of New Literary History, and the author of Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Harvard UP, 1989), The Gender of Modernity (Harvard UP, 1995), Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York UP, 2000), Literature After Feminism (Chicago UP, 2003), Uses of Literature (Blackwell, 2008), The Limits of Critique (Chicago UP, 2015), and Hooked: Art and Attachment (Chicago UP, 2020).

ABSTRACT:

This paper will draw out affinities between the ideas of Hartmut Rosa and two novels: Stoner by John Williams and Theory by Dionne Brand. Both novels capture moments when words crackle, reverberate, come alive; they speak to the transformative aspects of intellectual life, while also portraying the alienating aspects of academic institutions. The idea of resonance, I argue, can clarify the force of attachments to both literature and theory; it speaks to the phenomenology as well as sociology of our intellectual commitments.