Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. The Rise of the Contemporary Novella (November 14, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/69109 69109-17244700@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, November 14, 2019 4:00pm
Location: Angell Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

The Rise of the Contemporary Novella

The novella has emerged as a premier global form of contemporary literature. The subject of popular writing workshops and major reprint series by both trade and experimental publishing houses, it caters to a desire for novelness in a moment of compressed time for writers and readers alike. But what is it about the form that drives our love of it? How does the relationship between time and technology structure its compelling status as well as the narratives of its history chosen to contextualize it? My examples, from the crucial subgenre of the SF novella as well as its experimental counterparts, will suggest that the mechanics of narrative length and ambition have been mobilized by contemporary writers and readers alike through the novella to reflexively recast relationships between fiction, media, and genre.


Kate Marshall is associate professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she also serves on the faculty of the history and philosophy of science. She is the author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction (2013), and articles on technology, media, and narrative. She is co-editor of the Post45 book series at Stanford University Press and is on the collective’s editorial board. She has just completed a study of the desire for nonhuman narration in contemporary literature and theory that traces its history in the old, weird American fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her current project is a minor theory of the novella, especially as it frames conceptions of completeness in contemporary culture

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 05 Nov 2019 00:02:17 -0500 2019-11-14T16:00:00-05:00 2019-11-14T17:30:00-05:00 Angell Hall Department of English Language and Literature Lecture / Discussion A shelf of books.
Cosmic Realism (November 15, 2019 10:00am) https://events.umich.edu/event/69111 69111-17244701@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Friday, November 15, 2019 10:00am
Location: Angell Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

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.

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Workshop / Seminar Tue, 05 Nov 2019 00:00:54 -0500 2019-11-15T10:00:00-05:00 2019-11-15T11:30:00-05:00 Angell Hall Department of English Language and Literature Workshop / Seminar simply books.
Comparative Literature Lecture Series 2019-20: Respite: 12 Anthropocene Fragments (February 13, 2020 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/70058 70058-17505681@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 13, 2020 4:00pm
Location: Tisch Hall
Organized By: Comparative Literature

This talk draws on work in the environmental humanities to rewrite the Anthropocene as autotheory. Written in a poetic-philosophical mode, “Respite” brings together 12 fragments as autotheoretical forms—autocollage, autothermograph, nested equation, and 9 others—for a self confronted with the unthinkable extinction of all life on earth. Grounded in human and natural archives, “Respite” is framed by Sylvia Wynter’s and Michel Foucault’s theoretical critiques of anthropos (Man). In casting self-writing as an experiment, “Respite” offers a new ethical model for being present to life in its ending.

Lynne Huffer is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. She is the author of *Foucault’s Strange Eros* (forthcoming 2020); *Are the Lips a Grave?: A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex* (2013); *Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory* (2010); *Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures: Nostalgia, Ethics, and the Question of Difference* (1998); and *Another Colette: The Question of Gendered Writing* (1992). She has published academic articles on feminist theory, queer theory, Foucault, ethics, and the Anthropocene, as well as personal essays, creative nonfiction, and opinion pieces in mass media venues. With Chicago artist Jennifer Yorke she also created Wading Pool, a collaborative artists book http://www.vampandtramp.com/finepress/h/Lynne-Huffer-Jennifer-Yorke.html.

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Lecture / Discussion Thu, 23 Jan 2020 15:57:03 -0500 2020-02-13T16:00:00-05:00 2020-02-13T17:30:00-05:00 Tisch Hall Comparative Literature Lecture / Discussion Lynne Huffer
CANCELLED: CCSW "Contemporary Narratives" Writing Workshop (March 26, 2020 1:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/72972 72972-18116563@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, March 26, 2020 1:00pm
Location: Angell Hall
Organized By: Department of English Language and Literature

The Critical Contemporary Studies Workshop's writing workshop will give graduate students a chance to get feedback in small groups from faculty respondents and graduate student peers on works-in-progress about contemporary literature, art, or culture. The papers will be pre-circulated to the assigned groups. The intention of the workshop is to bring together students in different departments and to spark discourse across traditional generic and/or disciplinary boundaries.

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Workshop / Seminar Thu, 12 Mar 2020 13:56:48 -0400 2020-03-26T13:00:00-04:00 2020-03-26T14:30:00-04:00 Angell Hall Department of English Language and Literature Workshop / Seminar