The Kinetic Text

Date
Thu June 6th 2019, 6:30pm
Location
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room

Speaker(s): Jessica Beckman

The Poetics Workshop cordially invites you to our last meeting of the year on Thursday, June 6th, at 6.30pm in the Humanities Center Board Room. Jessica Beckman (English) will discuss her current book project, The Kinetic Text, of which an excerpt is here attached. Hannah Smith-Drelich (English) will offer a response. As usual, a light dinner will be served.
 
Here is what Jessica has to say about her project:
 
The Kinetic Text develops a theory of early modern poetics based on the ways that literary texts use form and format to encourage nonlinear reading. It asks: what happens when literature demands a shift our mode of reading, and how do we assign meaning to the absences, pauses, or redirections within it? How and why do texts invite reading that is not serial and immersive, but spatial, discontinuous, or self-aware? Working across new formalism and book history, the project frames the ways that early modern texts translate acts of reading into a poetics of movement, manifesting temporality, loss, estrangement, or desire through the starts and stops, recursions and rotations, of the material text.
 
Jessica Beckman is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of English, specializing in renaissance literature and the material text. This fall she will begin a three-year position as a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Smith College in Massachusetts.
 
Hannah Smith-Drelich is a fifth year graduate student in the English department, studying Renaissance literature and food culture.