MLA 2019 (Get ready Chicago...)
Today I leave for Chicago to take
part in the annual MLA conference. For
those not in the know, MLA is part of the annual migratory pattern for
literature scholars. Not everyone attends,
but a lot of people do, and the sense of obligation that surrounds it is both
exciting and unmercifully stressful.
It’s something academics both dread and look forward to—we anticipate
and hesitate, take a deep breath and dive in.
This year, I’m participating in two
sessions. One is a roundtable that I
organized, informed by my dissertation research. It’s titled “Unthinkable Presents:
Modernism’s Science Fictions.” I won’t
go too much into the topic, but it suffices to say that modernism and science
fiction are two literary modes that haven’t been adequately addressed alongside
one another, although critics are doing more about this all the time. My own research focuses on science-fictional
imagery and ideas in late modernist writing, organized around the emerging
midcentury field of cybernetics; so I look primarily at mid-twentieth-century
writers, rather than earlier modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
The title, “Unthinkable Presents,”
is inspired partly by a William Gibson quote, but it’s also a pun—unthinkable presents in a temporal sense, i.e. the
present moment, but also unthinkable presence. In this, I’m referring to the strangeness of
trying to contemplate our own immediate existence, how it’s always evading our
full comprehension and making us look, I think, more than a little alien. Part of my fascination about literary
representation is how it refocuses the human, something that we take for
granted without realizing how much we’ve built it up over the course of our
existence. The human is something we
are, but it’s also something we’ve made.
The second session I’m in is a panel
on Samuel Beckett and science. I’ll be
presenting a paper on Beckett’s “cybernetics of observation,” by which I mean
the way Beckett incorporates moments of observation in order to explore notions
of complexity. Let’s hope the audience
finds it as riveting and meaningful as I do…
Anyway, here are some links to my
sessions. If you’ll be at MLA, hopefully
I’ll see you there; if not—thanks for reading. 😊
Comments
Post a Comment