Materia: Literature and Expenditure

Please join the next materia event "Literatures and Expenditure", a conversation between Professor Jaime Rodríguez Matos (Fresno State University) and Romina Wainberg (PhD candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford).

About the event:

To Get Out of Our Human Nook: Chance, Thinking, Literature in the Anthropocene

Recent interventions concerning the link between the humanities and the Anthropocene have returned to well-known literary tropes for the de-centering of the human point of view vis-à-vis "Nature" and the world. I propose to engage with this line of thinking by interrogating the intersection of chance, thinking, and the idea of literature in the work of Nietzsche, Bataille, Neruda and Juarroz.

Jaime Rodríguez Matos (CSU, Fresno) is the author of Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time (Fordham UP, 2017).

Against Predictability: Affordances of Unproductive Writing for Anthropodecentric Thinking

My talk examines affordances of “unproductive writing practices” as depicted in two nineteenth-century Latin American novels: Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis’ The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881). I propose that, in these novels, characters’ engagement with unproductive writing affords them an openness toward human and non-human disruptions, unsuspected entanglements, and unpredictable occurrences. In stressing the potentialities of unproductivity and unpredictability (or unpredictability within unproductivity), these novels prompt us to redefine the concept of writing and to reengage with the writerly process from an anthropodecentric perspective.

Romina Wainberg is a PhD Candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. She coordinates the DIF project "Queer Latin American Voices" and the France-Stanford collaborative initiative "The Multiplicity Turn: Theories of Identity from Poetry to Mathematics."

materia is a DLCL Focal (formerly Working) Group on anthropodecentric thinking.