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Atmospheric Misogyny and the Lyric Tradition

Thursday Lecture Series, Ambivalence

dateFebruary 27, 2020 timeThursday, 12:15pm EST location The Heyman Center, Second Floor Common Room, Columbia University
Organizer
  • Allison Turner
Notes
  • Audience open exclusively to Columbia faculty, students, and invited guests
  • All others interested in attending, please email SOF/Heyman at [email protected].
Rembrandt Laughing by Rembrandt, painting

This presentation describes the role of levity in the reproduction of gender subordination. It seeks to understand the relationship between literary atmosphere and gendered habits of perception, arguing that lyric poetry, with its fine-tuned instruments of attention management, is an especially useful site for exploring this problem. Looking to poems by John Donne and Aphra Behn, and giving special attention to Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," I describe a version of levity that depends on an incomplete or frozen decision that someone or something is unworthy of attention -- a decision that establishes an experience of ambivalence in which the outcome is determined but not actually pursued. In these cases, the gendered conferral of triviality on someone or something does not direct attention elsewhere but instead reframes attention as pleasurably superfluous. Ultimately, I make an argument for the importance of levity, understood in these terms, as a subject for feminist and queer inquiry, and reflect on the challenges of cultivating an anti-patriarchal sensorium.

Guest lecturer: David Simon, University of Maryland
Associate Professor of English