In RTB 151, you heard the Kristin, Nasser and John discussing what might happen before their Northeastern Victorian Studies Association conference actually took place. This episode, recorded a few weeks later, looks back at what actually occurred and see how it aligned with or defied the panelists’ prior expectations.
The three discuss what it means to have an emergent and residual shticks; differences between how you prepare to talk to undergraduates and your peers matter, and the three agree that going in without any expectations of your audience makes for a weaker presentation. Imaginary interlocution makes for better pre-gaming.
Kristin Mahoney ‘s books include Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family. Nasser Mufti ‘s first scholarly book was Civilizing War and he is currently working on a monograph about what Britain’s nineteenth century looks like from the perspective of such anti-colonial thinkers as C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. (RTB listeners don’t need to hear about John or his Arendt obsession).
Mentioned in the episode:
Stephen Greenblatt “salutary anxiety” in Shakespearean Negotiations. “”the ruling elite believed that a measure of insecurity and fear was a necessary, healthy element in the shaping of proper loyalties, and. . .deliberately evoked this insecurity. . .Salutary anxiety blocks the anger and resentment that would well up against what must, if contemplated in a secure state, seem an unjust order.”
Jonathan Lethem’s detective says “tell your story walking” in Motherless Brooklyn.
Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground : “this is still you, talking.”
In Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, the same feature manifests as an italicized interlocutor…
Nasser quoted Valentin Volishinov and John quoted Mikhail Bakhtin on versions of heteroglossia (same dude).
Is a friendly regional conference, with supportive interlocutors (what John calls the Cranford effect) a good or bad thing?
Edward Said, Intellectual Exile
Kristen praises the wonderful work of an early-career scholar, Jacob Romanow, especially “Mediating Whiteness: Triangular Radicalization in teh Anglo-Indian Picaresque.”
Kristin Nasser and Jon lavished praise on the NVSA final panel, with these papers:
· Olivia Linyi Xu (Northwestern University), “‘Their Immortals Are Not Ours’: Misreading Tess in Early Twentieth-Century China”
· Brandon Katzir (Smith College), “From New York to Warsaw: Victorian Afterlives in Yiddish”
· Julia Chin (Yale University), “Drowning Ophelia: The Late Victorian & Reading Out of Order in Sōseki’s Kusamakura”
Anna Tsing’s productive concept of Friction was new to John.
Anna Burns, Milkman (2018).
John and Kristin explore their different responses to Belfast, its sectarianism and those murals of Bobby Sands.
Reclaim the Enlightenment (eloquently described from within in Clare Mitchell’s The Ghost Limb.
The (partially Protestant) Young Ireland movement, and successors such as Yeats, AE, Lady Gregory.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (1961).
Edward Said, “Representations of the Intellectual”
Glenn Patterson Lapsed Protestant.
Steve McQueen film on Bobby Sands, Hunger.
Recall This Book 