October 13, 2016
Assistant professor of German Necia Chronister to present modern languages department's fall Signatures Lecture
Necia Chronister, assistant professor of German, will present "Conceiving of a Realfictional Body: Jenny Erpenbeck, Material Feminisms, and the Unruly Body in Fiction" as part of the modern languages department's fall Signatures Lecture at 2:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, in 127 Leadership Studies Building.
In the last 10 years, new feminist theories on the body and the material world conceptualize agency beyond human subjectivity, what relationship those agencies have to human cultures and what that means for feminism.
Understandably, however, material feminisms have been difficult for literary scholars to make use of, because they insist on understanding the body as neither metaphoric nor a product of discourse.
"Conceiving of a Realfictional Body" is an attempt to reconcile material feminist sensibilities and literary studies using the unruly body in contemporary German author Jenny Erpenbeck's "Story of the Old Child." The book's indexical traces of the material world challenge to us intellectually as embodied readers and affective employment of awkwardness.