Spotlight

2016 Wellek Lectures | Katherine Hayles

N. Katherine Hayles. James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University, will present the 2016 Wellek Lectures: Precarious Prospects: Biological and Media Extinction

Wednesday, May 18; Thursday, May 19; Friday, May 20
All lectures at 4:00 pm in Humanities Gateway 1030

Lecture 1.  Entwinement: Bodies in Biological and Media Extinction

The provocation of these lectures is to consider literary print texts in which fear of biological extinction merges with fear of media extinction, that is, the possibility that print as a medium is becoming extinct.   Especially intriguing is the counter-intuitive tendency in some literary texts to welcome the extinction of the human species, including, of course, authors and readers of print texts.  How can we understand why extinction presents itself not as an unambiguous evil but as a mixed prospect that has some beneficial aspects?  Introducing the concept, this lecture will explore the first of three topoi, the body.  When the focus is on the body, at risk is the materiality of the text itself:  its corporeal existence that shows signs of trauma, bound up with fears about the continued existence and vitality of humans as a biological species.  Two tutor texts will guide this inquiry: Jess Stoner’s experimental print text I Have Blinded Myself Writing This, and the belated print text The Silent History, which appeared first as apps for the iPhone.

Lecture 2.  Memoralizing Print: Individual and Collective Memory in J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S

Since classical times, writing has been linked to memory—either as an externalization that preserves memory across generations, or as a threat that will  inevitably diminish the human capacity to remember, as in Socrates’ famous charge.  S. a collaborative project conceived by Abrams and written by Dorst, presents as an old library book stuffed with ephemera and encased in a cardboard holder—postcards, odd letters, images, etc.  These multiple print artifacts include the story of a protagonist who has lost his memory and takes the name S. from a paper scrap he finds in his pocket.  They also include handwritten marginalia by Jen and Eric, contemporary students in pursuit of the encoded relationship between the print book’s author and translator.  At a time when digital databanks and web networks threaten to displace print inscriptions as central repositories of cultural memory,  S. explores the relation between the individual and the archive in multiple senses, celebrating the print book even as it inscribes its precarity and deep penetration by digital marks.

Lecture 3.  Precarious Narratives: The Risky Behaviors of Print Books No Longer Able to Tell Coherent Stories

As print books increasingly fear for their future, experiments appear exploring what it would mean to lose the enduring staple of print literary production, long narrative fiction.  David Markham’s 1988 print text Wittgenstein’s Mistress features as its protagonist Kate, a woman who believes she is the last living human on the planet.  In a beach house, Kate sits typing words and sentences that she believes no one else will ever read, fragments that do not cohere into a plot but rather present as disconnected observations on the room, her body, her situation, and the nature of language and representation. Whether Kate really is the lone survivor or a victim of a mental dysfunction that makes her believe this is a less interesting question than the kind of experiment that the text undertakes: imagining how the world would appear to someone who inhabited the world described by Ludwig Wittengstein in the Tractatus.  Pre-internet, the text presciently anticipates the world of relational databases, in which anything can be correlated with anything but causality—that necessary premise to narrative fiction-- remains elusive.

Artist installation: Ackroyd & Harvey
Conflicted Seeds + Spirit, University of Cambridge
Design: Pentagram, 2016
Photography: Nick Turner