Please join us for a discussion of U-M Comparative Literature PhD candidate Amanda Kubic’s dissertation chapter, “The Body in Fragments.” You can sign up to receive the chapter and Zoom link here: https://forms.gle/21EXryxj5JGy9oi16.

“In this chapter, I explore how various women poets and artists in the late 20th and early 21st century have received two of the most exemplary fragmented female figures from Greek antiquity: the Venus de Milo and Sappho. In five fragmentary exercises, I look at the performance art of Irish artist Mary Duffy in “Cutting the Ties that Bind (Heroes)” (1987) and Vital Signs: Crip Culture Talks Back (1995), the contemporary poems of Robin Coste Lewis in Voyage of the Sable Venus (2015), the lyrics of co-authors Olga Borumas and T. Begley in Sappho’s Gymnasium (1994), and selections from Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke’s collections Beings and Things on Their Own (1986) and The Scattered Papers of Penelope (2009). Through these examples, I invite us to think more about how a corpus in pieces can (re)signify for contemporary women artists looking to antiquity to understand bodily presence and absence in the material and narrative archives of the past; racialized, (dis)abled, and gendered embodiment; and queer/crip subjectivity, desire, and aesthetics.”