We are excited to announce an upcoming talk by Deidre Lynch (Dept. of English, Harvard), sponsored by the UConn Humanities Institute, the Department of English, and the UConn Library. We expect it will be an excellent talk, so we hope you'll consider attending.
Thursday, March 26, 4 p.m.
In-person: UConn Humanities Institute
"Papyromania: Women, Books, and Scraps in the Long Eighteenth Century"
This paper will—recursively enough—be about women’s works on paper and work with paper and how through those projects of paper-collection and paper-handling women during the long eighteenth century navigated the conundrums that attend on the role of archivist of the ephemeral. It derives from a larger project, one engaging an archive of eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century papercraft, decoupage, collage, manuscript commonplace books, florilegia, notebooks, friendship albums, and scrap-screens: a project in which I aim to recover, as a crucial dimension of the media theory of modernity, a set of under-recognized, under-valued practices of piecework and scrap-thinking. Stealing some of the lustre from that more glamorous object, so beloved of post-Romantic literary theory, the fragment, I have been aiming to win for scrap and scraps, both inside and outside of scrap books, both as inserts and as extracts, some recognition of their key role in modern literary and media history. Thinking about the scrap and scraps can also be, I propose, a way to deepen and refine our account of the relationship of women to the structures of cultural remembrance that we associate so firmly with literature and books.
Deidre Shauna Lynch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of English Literature at Harvard University. Her most recent books include Loving Literature: A Cultural History (2015) and (co-edited with Alexandra Gillespie) The Unfinished Book (2021). She is currently completing “Paper Slips: A Literary, Media, and Material History of Scrap”: essays related to this project have appeared in Representations, Critical Inquiry, and Studies in Romanticism.
Sponsored by the UConn Humanities Institute, the Department of English, and the UConn Library
For more information, contact: Brandon Hurst, English Department at brandon.hurst@uconn.edu