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Frances Ferguson will discuss "Records of Reward: Essays on Literature and Value." She will be joined in conversation by Heather Keenleyside. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. At the Co-op.
About the book: A selection of essays revealing the singular brilliance of Ferguson’s critical writing over four decades.
Ranging across literature, philosophy, and social thought, Frances Ferguson asks how forms—whether aesthetic, legal, or bureaucratic—help to assign value and thereby organize our relationships as well as our personal identities. Gathering Ferguson’s most influential and still timely essays, "Records of Reward" includes, among others, “The Nuclear Sublime,” in which Ferguson turns to Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein" to show how the aesthetic logic of the sublime obscures the claims of domesticity and the beautiful; “Rape and the Rise of the Novel,” which examines the history of rape law to highlight the importance of consent in Samuel Richardson’s "Clarissa;" “Pornography, the Theory,” where she explores the threshold between speech and action to identify environments—such as schools and workplaces—in which pornographic expression can be harmfully potentiated; and “Jane Austen, Emma, and the Impact of Form,” in which she analyzes Austen’s use of free indirect style to depict both her protagonist and her reader engaged in acts of “over-knowing” others in everyday life. Most unexpectedly, perhaps, the collection also includes an essay analyzing Bitcoin as a small language model that exerts enormous affective pressure on its partisans.
Attesting to the rewards of theory and close reading alike, "Records of Reward" will be essential reading across the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and political thought.
About the author: Frances Ferguson is the Mabel Greene Myers Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of "Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action;" "Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation;" and "Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit."
About the interlocutor: Heather Keenleyside is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of "Animals and Other People: Literary Forms and Living Beings in the Long Eighteenth Century."
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5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637
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