This writing workshop will feature a pre-circulated article in-progress by Professor Kate Marshall (ND). Abstract below:

“Cosmic Realism”

In this chapter, I focus on how scale and perspective interact with materialist fantasies in contemporary realist fiction and in the larger cultural debates surrounding it. By attending to forms of diffuse narrative sentience moving through the novel, I discuss two kinds of narrative reach for radical exteriority, exemplified in texts by Marilynne Robinson and Teju Cole. These frustrated attempts at nonhuman narration either attempt to locate consciousness in wildly distant objects and materials, or are eliminative, trying to imagine a world or narrative outside of consciousness or human knowledge. I situate both attempts in a history of realist theory that has had much more room for nonhuman narrative than our most recent engagements with it have remembered.