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Towards a Modernist Ecology of Riddle

A talk by Rasheed Tazudeen (Yale University, English) on a non-anthropocentric way of understanding riddle in literature sponsored by the Dartmouth Society of Fellows.

10/24/2024
4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Carpenter Hall 201F
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Arts, Arts and Sciences, Lectures & Seminars
How does modernist literature help us to think about planetary change, including climate collapse, sea-level rise, mass species extinctions and the onset of the Anthropocene, and other aspects of our current ecological catastrophe? In this talk, I explore how modernist and contemporary metamodernist writers—particularly Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs—persistently engaged with questions of ecological thought, species extinction, and the forms that ethical co-existence between human and nonhuman or inhuman beings (including the planet itself) might take. The enigma or riddle, I argue, is a central modernist trope through which to (re)imagine relations between humans, nonhumans, environments, and the cosmos themselves outside of a human-centric framework. 
 
As a way of developing a theory of modernist enigma as ecological practice, I discuss three particularly vibrant (meta)modernist purveyors of riddle: Kafka’s Odradek, a sentient, talking, playful star-shaped spool of thread who co-exists uneasily with the human family whose house he comes to inhabit; Woolf’s Anon, or the primordial balladeer who sings the communal, bird-inflected song-languages of the forest that cannot be translated into human history and human speech; and the “mud mothers” of Gumbs’ M: Archive, who employ enigmatic rhythms and dances as a means of ongoing communion with the earth in the aftermath of mass human extinction. Taken together, these three figures help us to think towards an inhuman imaginary, or one that does not organize itself entirely around human ways of knowing and conceptualizing, and instead immerses us in the generative enigmas that limn our relations to other-than-human beings and an increasingly unknowable planetary future.
For more information, contact:
Yiren Zheng
yiren.zheng@dartmouth.edu
Permanent URL to this event: https://society-fellows.dartmouth.edu/events/event?event=75713

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.