Events

This talk explores how Victorian little magazines—avant-garde periodicals focusing on literary and visual arts—provided a nexus for queer artistic expression and collaboration in late-Victorian Britain. The coteries that formed around these little magazines became known for their queer-coded art, especially through their adoption of experimental narrative and representational strategies associated with the Decadent Movement. However, this queer reputation also attracted homophobic backlash: in the wake of the 1895 Oscar Wilde trials, the most successful little magazine, The Yellow Book, fired its leading artist, Aubrey Beardsley, for his public association with Wilde. Together with other disaffected contributors to The Yellow Book, Beardsley founded a rival periodical, The Savoy, providing a refuge for the Decadent avant-garde. Examining the image-text dynamics Beardsley employs in his literary, visual, and editorial contributions to The Savoy, and drawing on queer theories of temporality, narratology, and bibliography, I argue that Beardsley develops novel queer narrative and representational strategies that foreground sexual and gender non-conformance and redirect narrative attention toward the present moment of aesthetic encounter, inviting readers to participate in the magazine’s queer aesthetics. The Savoy thus provided a multimodal site of resistance to the homophobic and anti-decadent culture in the wake of the Wilde trials and set a trajectory for queer expression and collaboration at the Victorian fin-de-siècle.

Claudia Rankine and John Lucas’ Situation 11 centres the 2020 Central Park birdwatching incident, where Black birder Christian Cooper filmed white dog walker Amy Cooper (no relation) threatening to call the police on him after he asked her to leash her dog. Layering C. Cooper’s film in conjunction with other filmed incidents of white women making racialized threats, Situation 11 intercepts A. Cooper’s threat through auditory and visual repetition, refusing to let the original video play in its entirety. Instead, Situation 11 shutters, slows down, and repeats clips of her threat under Rankine’s own poetic ruminations on white female rage as a violent call to its own “protection” from blackness.

This talk posits that Situation 11 reinscribes the violence depicted on screen instead of managing it through the deployment of its formal choices, arguing that the deliberate drawing out of such filmed incidents provides both time and space for their diffusion without substantial mediation of the filmic image—including for white women such as A. Cooper to insist that encountering Black people constitutes an “emergency.”

Kanika Lawton (they/them) is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies Institute, where they are also part of the collaborative specialization at the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. They hold an MA from the Cinema Studies Institute and a BA in Psychology with a Minor in Film Studies from the University of British Columbia. Their intellectual interests coalesce around a broader investment in theorizing and historicizing socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic shifts in a post-9/11 United States through close attention to what they term “surveillant media,” as well as an ethical commitment to those most disproportionately impacted by the snowballing effects of U.S. security and surveillance apparatuses. Subsequently, their SSHRC-funded dissertation puts forth a two-pronged claim: neutrality is an affect that expresses itself through violence, and such violence has been dismissed across both surveillance studies and cinema studies with regards to the aesthetic quality of surveillant media. Deeply indebted to Black studies, whiteness studies, affect theory, queer theory, and trans studies, their dissertation intends to make acutely visible the entrenched violences of U.S. surveillance practices without reproducing the violent visibility that structures them. Alongside being a CSUS/NFC Doctoral Fellow, Kanika is the President of the Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union and a Lead of the Queer & Trans Negativity Working Group at the Jackman Humanities Institute. Their work has been published in Spectator and Media Fields.

How might literary style respond to the violences of racialization? Scholars have lately theorized racialization in the United States through the psychoanalytic mechanism they term racial melancholia: “the institutional process,” according to Anne Anlin Cheng, “of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others.” As excluded-yet-retained others, these Americans are placed in what she provocatively refers to as a “suspended position” within the national psyche. This is a state that may, for David Eng and Shinhee Han, impose a set of symptoms not dissimilar to those experienced by Freud’s melancholic, including but not limited to “a profoundly painful dejection” and “a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings,” “culminat[ing]” in an “expectation of punishment.”

By bringing into conversation prominent accounts of racial melancholia, this talk reads the suspended position as a space in which to navigate the immediate violences of a white supremacist state and develop new, collective, and subnational futurities within that state. I show how literary style—specifically, the literary minimalism practiced in Julie Otsuka’s novels of Japanese American internment—not only endorses such futurities but enacts them through a method I call discontinuity: the interruption of linear-progressivist and state-sponsored temporalities by means of a recursive and fragmented minimalist stylistics.

This talk explores points of convergence and divergence in the construction of auto- and metafictional narrative modes in Javier Marías’ and Ben Lerner’s novels. Specifically, I aim to compare the evolution of these modes across both authors’ seminal “auto” trilogies in order to analyze the fictional mutations their narrators experience throughout various texts. In this paper, I argue that what Marías and Lerner seek, above all else, is the construction of a fictionalized “I” whose voice permeates each novel even as their narrators shift. This voice is reflexive, essayistic, self-conscious and often ironic, allowing Lerner and Marías to move beyond the purely autobiographical and into the metafictional, openly questioning the construction of not only their respective novels, but also of their respective authorial personas. Finally, this paper seeks to examine how Lerner and Marías’ auto- and metafictional projects are complemented and challenged by the integration of photographs into the text as well as the conception of time the authors employ.

Sonia Scarlat is a PhD candidate in the Department of Philology at the University of Salamanca. Her research focuses on the intersection of autofiction and metafiction in contemporary Spanish and North American literatures. In recent papers, she has examined the specifics of familial narratives and the use of photography in the construction of a personal archive (“The Value of Reality. The Document and Autofiction in Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre by Cristina Fallarás”; “El valor de lo real. El documento y la autoficción en Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre de Cristina Fallarás.”) as well as the affinities between self-portraiture and autofiction (“Strategies For a Collective Self-portrait: Autofiction and the Body in Lección de anatomía by Marta Sanz”; “Estrategias para un autorretrato colectivo: autoficción y cuerpo en La lección de anatomía de Marta Sanz”). Her doctoral thesis aims to propose a typology of auto-/metafictional modes across Spanish and American literatures of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, with a particular focus on the comparative analysis of the works of Javier Marías, Enrique Vila-Matas, Philip Roth, and Ben Lerner.