Event overview
Come along to GLITS for two fascinating presentations by PhD students Alice Carlill and Audrey Deveault followed by audience Q&A
Alice Carlill
"‘It’s the same as water, just a little bit more so’: hydrological memory, melancholy, and spectrality in Alexandra Kleeman’s Something New Under the Sun: (2021)"
Petrocriticism is by now well established, having articulated the degree to which oil saturates material and cultural infrastructures and imaginaries. Oil has unequivocally (though unevenly) enabled the cruelly optimistic neoliberal fantasy of the ‘good life’. Its elision with the happier affects and socio-economic freedoms of twentieth-century Western modernity fundamentally underwrites that modernity’s recommitment to ever-more invasive extractivism, with Stephanie LeMenager’s concept of ‘petromelancholia’ conveying the unresolved grief and amnesiac remembrance that characterises the ambivalent or refused transition away from fossil fuels (2014).
Whilst the study of petrocultures has flourished in environmental humanities scholarship, there is a noticeable paucity of scholarship on freshwater and culture – a curious absence, given water’s biophysical necessity. This paper considers the role of water enclosure and commodification in Alexandra Kleeman’s recent novel Something New Under the Sun. In a near-future Los Angeles where synthetic water (‘WAT-R’) has monopolised the market, I contend that Kleeman mobilises a hydrological unconscious to illuminate the coalescence of hydrological memory and melancholia, and introduces the hydro-spectral as a literary device that remembers the forgotten entanglement of the human and nonhuman and explores the speculative consequences of a transition from the ‘cheap water’ economy to something more sinister.
Audrey Deveault
"Spectres of the South: Guilt and Whiteness in Contemporary Narratives of Slavery and the Civil War"
Novels published at the turn of the twenty-first century re-engaged with the history of slavery and the Civil War. Focusing mainly on three texts, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997), Valerie Martin’s Property (2003), and Stephen Wright’s The Amalgamation Polka (2006), I show how American fiction has become haunted by the spectre(s) of the South. In the process, these authors stage the formation of a white subject, in the figure of the geographical South and the individual Southern plantation owner, that is conceived as both part of and apart from the nation and onto which America’s sins can be projected. However, the historical, cultural, and geographical border between the North and the South, symbolized by the Mason-Dixon line, is porous and hegemonic American identity finds itself haunted by the history of the reintegrated secessionist Southern States. These authors use the gothic mode to engage with and complicate the historical novel as genre. In doing so, they create spaciotemporal disruptions and boundary crossings that destabilize rigid categories but also, at times, re-entrench notions of race, whiteness, and historical guilt.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 8 Feb 2024 | 5:15pm - 7:00pm |
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