The Excremental and the Respiratory: New Books on Mediation, Matter, and Morbidity

Date: 

Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 5:00pm

Location: 

Online

New Directions in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

SPEAKERs: Annabel L. Kim, Harvard University, and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, York University

This event marks the release of two books in literary and sexuality studies: Annabel L. Kim's Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature and Jean-Thomas Tremblay's Breathing Aesthetics. These monographs elaborate the poetics and politics of mundane socio-physiological processes. They investigate different corpora—Francophone in one case, primarily Anglophone in the other—but both identify, at the heart of modern and contemporary cultural production, an impulse to engage the death, decay, and decomposition that animate life. Kim and Tremblay will deliver remarks on each other's book, after which they will provide a response. A conversation with event attendees will follow. PDFs of excerpts from the books are attached below. Please use the following links for more information on the books: Cacaphonies and Breathing Aesthetics.

Annabel L. Kim is the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Kim is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French fiction and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (Ohio State University Press, 2018) and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), as well as the editor of a special issue of Diacritics (Vol. 48, no. 3, 2020) on the politics of citation.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University, where they teach and research across environmental and sexuality studies as well as modern and contemporary literary, screen, and performance cultures. They are the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, October 2022) and, with Andrew Strombeck, a coeditor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (State University of New York Press, 2021).

How To join

Please add your name and email address to this registration page. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with a link and passcode to the event. 

The password to access the PDFs of excerpts (attached below) will be included in your registration confirmation email.

If you have any questions, please conatct Jung Choi at choi2@fas.harvard.edu

annabel_kim_-_cacaphonies_-_mahindra_excerpt1.pdf388 KB
tremblay_breathing_aesthetics_intro-mahindra.pdf359 KB