Description:

CoVid-19: Critical/Creative Studies in Music, Image, and Text initiative supported by the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. 

When: July 23, 2020 04:00 PM Central Time (US and Canada) 

CoVid-19: Critical/Creative Studies in Music, Image, and Text returns with a literary focus on Thursday. Featuring the critical theorist Anna Kornbluh (author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, 2019), environmental activist and critic of US militarization Kathleen Blackburn, and contemporary poet Amish Trivedi, we’ll be discussing the role of literary production within the horizon of the pandemic. Together, we’ll ask questions like: what resources might be crafted and/or adapted to promote forms of mutual aid in the midst of the crisis through writerly means of political expression and self-exploration? What will be its forms?

Isolation is a defining quality of quarantine existence; the pandemic diary is its genre. Individuated, personalized experience has been epistemic virtue and commercial good for decades, so the virus merely intensifies the aesthetic privatizations that have been dominating the literary field (memoir, autofiction, autotheory). Dehumanizing calamities would seem of course to call for more urgent self-expression; Americans love recognition as remedy for distribution inequities.  Ceaseless burning emergency compresses representation’s dimensionality, resulting in a cult of immediacy. And yet. Perverse as it may sound, fiction, abstraction, and mediation remain powerful, “now more than ever.”

Registration in advance is required

https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYscuiopzwvHtYXpQY1KDMpT-_cIhQTjwlq 

More information regarding the project is available at http://www.CriticalCreativeStudies.com/ 

Jake Leveton and Tamar Kharatishvili, Principle Co-Investigators: COVID-19: Ethics and Humanities Grant, Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University