Friendly Strangers and Strange Friends: Writing Relationality Now

Jeffrey Clapp is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. He focuses on literature in English, and is writing a book about contemporary literature in the United States. His previous writing has appeared or will appear in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, Critique, Life Writing, Mosaic, Partial Answers, Post45, Textual Practice, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and elsewhere. He is also director of the large-scale community reading project 我城我書 / One City One Book Hong Kong.

Dr. Jeffrey Clapp on his talk: According to Jacques Rancière, Gustave Flaubert “killed” Emma Bovary to secure his novel’s modernity. In this talk I pursue Rancière’s peculiar reading strategy, in which authorial treatment of character gives vantage on both genre and periodization. I trace this strategy through its reception by Rey Chow, who refigures authorship as “capture,” then locate it again in Maggie Nelson’s defense of the “art of cruelty.” I go on to ask if less violent and more mutable forms of authorial relating can also inform claims about contemporary writing and contemporary genre. What, for example, is the difference between an aesthetic of “capture” and recent evocations of “holding,” understood as a form of attention and care? Focusing on hybrid aesthetic-sociological projects by Miranda July and Claudia Rankine, I propose that awkward, uneasy, or ambivalent relations between authors and characters are a central means by which writers consider contemporary relationality.