Friday, February 2, 2024

Lucy Ellis Lounge in the Foreign Languages Building

The first of two Trowbridge Symposia—”Interlocutions in American Literary History”—will take place on February 2, to be followed by another symposium on March 1. The first symposium will be hosted in the Lucy Ellis Lounge in the Foreign Languages Building.

Admission is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

2 February Schedule

Gordon Hutner, at 9:45AM: Welcome

Sarah Wasserman (University of Delaware), at 10AM: “Scarcity value in time”: Ephemera, Digital Media, and Academic Trend

In a little-known essay, Freud defines “transience value” as “scarcity value in time.” Drawing on this strange formulation, The Death of Things explores the vanishing object-worlds of post-45 U.S. fiction. Combining psychoanalytic and material culture analysis, it shows how writers such as Ralph Ellison, Marilynne Robinson, and Don DeLillo use the novel as a privileged medium for reckoning with the changing object relations of postwar America. But what can Freud’s formulation and literary portraits of ephemera teach us about contemporary scholarly practice? With ever-shorter cycles of topical and methodological trend, “scarcity value in time” might well describe the forces shaping hiring and publishing now. Given the digitization of archives, our objects of study are both more and less permanent than they used to be. This two-edged phenomenon transfers attention from fixed canons to fleeting spotlights, raising the stakes of “object choice” for emerging scholars. In this talk, I’ll discuss my book and new projects in the context of academic trendlines, asking how we negotiate the tension between slow research and the increasingly rapid rhythms of intellectual favor.

Kate Marshall (University of Notre Dame), at 11AM: “Weird Century”

Has the world become weirder? This is a question that a reader of twentieth-century fiction might ask, perhaps especially a reader of realist novels. These novels, as I argue in my recent book Novels by Aliens, evince a genre creep of science fiction, fabulism, and the weird that contends with the fractured and competing crises of our time. By extending this argument through a set of contemporary novellas, I will discuss why genre is functioning as an important critical resource for twenty-first century writing. 

Lunch Break

Thomas Constantinesco (Sorbonne Université), at 2:00PM: “Blood Sugar: Food, Health, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth-Century United States”

Blood sugar is the body’s main source of energy and a common metric in biomedicine today. Yet it is also a multi-layered topos, indexing several entangled and racialized histories and linking the development of sugarcane plantations through enslaved labor in the Atlantic world from the sixteenth century on to the exponential rise of sugar consumption in the and nineteenth centuries, up to the emergence and the spread of diabetes as a chronic metabolic disease in the twentieth century. Exploring several instances of blood sugar rhetoric, especially in the writings of Sarah Orne Jewett and Henry James, this paper investigates some of the porous ecologies, economies, and histories in which sugar has been implicated across the long nineteenth century, in order to reflect on the social and cultural life of sugar and its role in “mediat[ing] conditions of health and illness” in the United States.

Erica Fretwell (University at Albany, SUNY), at 3:00PM: “The Affective Bind”

What do we talk about when we talk about affect? Based on her book Sensory Experiments, Fretwell connects the little-known science of sense experience called psychophysics to contemporary affect theory. While psychophysics is typically described as the immediate precursor to modern psychology, it advanced a materialist metaphysics that has proven foundational to theories of affect, aesthetics, and power. Uncovering its conceptual influence thickens our received histories of emotional life in the nineteenth century. Equally if not more important, it also underscores the methodological sleight of hand – one that trades theological for neurological givens – that underwrites how we conceive of affect. In a turn of the affective screw, then, this talk suggests that feeling may be internal to thinking but more than that, mediation is internal to the raucous ontology of the feeling body and its relations.

Speaker Bios

Sarah Wasserman is associate professor of English and director of the Center for Material Culture Studies at the University of Delaware. She is the author of The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and co-editor of Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) as well as Cultures of Obsolescence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Her essays appear in ALH, PMLA, Post45, ASAP, Contemporary Literature, Lit Compass, the Journal of American Studies, and various edited volumes. Her public writing has been published in Inside Higher Ed, Public Books, LARB, and Flaunt Magazine. In fall 2024 she’s moving to Dartmouth College, where she’ll be assistant dean of faculty affairs.

Kate Marshall is Associate Dean for Research and Strategic Initiatives at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves as Director of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts and is Associate Professor of English. She is the author of Novels by Aliens: Weird Tales and the Twenty-First Century (2023) and Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013). Marshall edits the Post*45 book series at Stanford University Press, and teaches at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont.

Thomas Constantinesco is Professor of American Literature at Sorbonne Université. He is the author of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essaying America (in French, 2012) and Writing Pain in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Oxford University Press, 2022), as well as essays and book chapters on nineteenth-century American Literature in such venues as ESQ, American Literary History, American Periodicals, Textual Practice, Transatlantica, the French Review of American Studies, and the Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body. He also translated works by Irving, Emerson, Melville, Twain, James, and Lovecraft into French.

Erica Fretwell is Associate Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling. She recently co-edited with Hsuan Hsu a special issue of American Literature titled “Senses with/out Subjects.” Her essays have appeared in American Literary History, PMLA, J19, and a number of edited volumes, including Timelines of American Literature and the Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body. She is currently developing a project on gender, disability, and anaesthetic existence called “The Art of Slight Living.”