About this Event
Plots of Precarity and Sustainable Endings
By Professor Caroline Levine (David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Cornell University)
Neither critics nor literary novelists have shown much love for happy endings over the past century. Scholars have been especially committed to open-endedness as the only way to point beyond present conditions to a genuinely different world.
This talk will make the case that this insistence on openness has reached its limit. We live in an age of acute precarity. As neoliberal economics undoes hopes of secure work, and as fossil fuels radically disrupt longstanding ecosystems, the most urgent threat facing people around the world is not oppressive stasis but radical instability—intensifying poverty and food insecurity, flooding, forest fires, violent conflicts over water, the rapid extinction of species.
Predictability and security have been bad words for artists and intellectuals, but they have also been much too easy to take for granted. It is therefore time for novel critics to rethink our relationship to endings. This talk will turn to two novels—Bessie Head’s The Question of Power and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues—to consider the political value of happy endings that focus our attention on the ongoing, collective labor of sustaining living bodies over time.
About The Susan Manning Memorial Lecture
Professor Susan Manning was Grierson Professor of English Literature and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh until her unexpected death in 2013.
This annual lecture is in memory of her as an internationally renowned academic with wide interests, particularly in Transatlanticism, and as an inspiring influence for an international coterie of scholars in the humanities.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Lecture Theatre G.03, 50 George Square, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
