Co-sponsored by Interdisciplinary French Studies.
Lecture
Claude Cahun’s Curiosity
October 16
Elvehjem L150
Thursday, 5 PM
Workshop*
(Response by Sarah Ensor)
Carson’s Kitsch Ecologies
October 17
University Club Rm 313
Friday, 12 PM
*Registration is required for participation in the workshop. Please register by emailing cvcps@mailplus.wisc.edu.
Lecture Abstract:
This talk explores the anti-fascistic potential of curiosity, taking avant-garde artist Claude Cahun as a case study. In 1930, Cahun and their partner Marcel Moore published Cancelled Confessions — a genre-exploding anti-memoir, alt-Surrealist collage experiment, and visual-verbal remapping of the genderqueer body. In place of Surrealism’s libidinal fixation on woman-as-muse, Cancelled Confessions offers up trans/queer curiosity as its edgy, wayward ethos. Hannah Freed-Thall will discuss how Cahun and Moore’s fierce defiance still speaks to us today.
Workshop Abstract:
Twenty-first-century ecological thought tends to coalesce around a certain critical framework. Decenter the human and resist anthropomorphism. Highlight “weedy” or “feral,” interstitial landscapes rather than pretty or picturesque ones. Refuse the reduction of the more-than-human world to commodity logic or road trip aesthetics. Sever ecological thought from its etymological origin in home, or oikos.
What, then, are we to make of the domestic images that suffuse Rachel Carson’s ecological writing? As evidenced by her personal correspondence and her published work, Carson was both an iconoclast and an appreciator of middlebrow objects and experiences, from greeting cards to children’s literature. This workshop will dig into Carson’s hominess—even kitschiness—as something other than bad or unrefined taste. We will consider a more generous reading of middlebrow eco-aesthetics, as grounded (sometimes) in moderation, humility, and the critique of arrogance.
Biography:
Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought, and Culture at NYU, and a specialist of comparative modernisms, environmental humanities, and gender/ sexuality studies. She is the author of Spoiled Distinctions: Aesthetics and the Ordinary in French Modernism (Oxford UP, 2015), which was awarded the Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies and the Modernist Studies Association Prize for a First Book, and Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons (Columbia UP, 2023), which received the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize.