CIDRAL Public Lecture: Christina Lupton (Copenhagen): 'Queer Times for the Straight Book: Michel Serres and Maggie Nelson'
| Dates: | 21 April 2020 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Arts, Languages and Cultures |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public, Post 16 |
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This event is part of CIDRAL's Public Intellectuals, Popularity and Populism programme.
Christina Lupton (University of Copenhagen) will deliver a public lecture entitled 'Queer Times for the Straight Book: Michel Serres and Maggie Nelson'.
This paper reads Nelson's The Argonauts together with Michael Serres’s arguments for non-chronological thinking about time. In both cases we are invited by the format and compositional practices of the writers to imagine forms of scholarly life that would transcend the chronological; criss-cross the historical. In the Argonauts this occurs at the level of story telling in a structure that seems to refute telos and narrative development; and to celebrate instead a story that seems to reclaim domestic space and happiness in non-teleological terms. MY argument is that in both cases this desire to think spatially about texts, and to imagine queerer forms of temporality, must contend with temporal realities of reading and humanist scholarship. In Nelson’s case, her autobiographical strategies point, in fact, to various ways in which she conjugates work and life and parenting quite explicitly in “straight” temporal terms. In Serres’s, various dialogues in which he explicitly discusses the life of the humanist reveal the ways he sees time non-negotiably as a reader. Is there not a sense in which reading itself, with the particular kinds of sequence and straightness it introduces to time, must be reckoned with rather than resisted by queer theory?
Christina Lupton is Professor of English at the University of Copenhagen.
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