In the face of today's myriad political, environmental, and methodological “climate” crises, reading may seem an unlikely response. At the same time, these crises challenge the viability of literary study as a professional mode of reading. The question then becomes how and why should we be reading? In response, this talk sets out to show the unique potential of literary study, one whose success is found not in its pragmatism, but in its visionary force allowing us to imagine that which does not (or does not yet) exist. Reading in crisis is nothing new, as evidenced by the 1897 essay “Crisis of Verse,” by French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. It is in response to “bad times” that Mallarmé pens the essay, championing the inventive force of language. Abigail Culpepper's reading of the essay hinges on the polysemantic French word temps (meaning “weather” or “time”) exposing a climatological vision in an essay that is ostensibly about a revolution in modernist verse. Taking “Crisis of Verse” as a model, they consider how a certain context or climate might influence how we read today, and vice versa—arguing that reading might change our climate. This requires, however, that we take seriously the relations literary (and literary critical) texts establish with other texts, with readers, and with the world around them. In further articulating the transformative potential of literary study, Abigail turns to Italo Calvino’s essay on “Lightness” before concluding with another atmospheric text, the poem “Élévation” by Charles Baudelaire, which, she argues, encourages us to read our way out from under the weight of an oppressive climate.
Lecture followed by Q&A.
Abigail Culpepper is a doctoral candidate in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. With an attention to textuality, their research focuses on problems of ecocritical reading, questions of literary scale, and the political relevance of literary criticism. Her dissertation “Figure of Sessility: Reading Plants, Poems, and other Still Things” argues, through readings of modernist poetry, that texts are dynamic participants in our environments and might even change them for the better.
Sponsored by L.P. Irvin Lecture Fund and the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies
