"The Excremental and the Respiratory: New Books on Meditation, Matter, and Morbidity" -- talk by Annabel L. Kim and Jean-Thomas Tremblay
November 15, 2022 at 5:00pm
Zoom (registration required)

This event marks the release of two books in literary and sexuality studies: Annabel L. Kim's Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature and Jean-Thomas Tremblay's Breathing Aesthetics. These monographs elaborate the poetics and politics of mundane socio-physiological processes. They investigate different corpora—Francophone in one case, primarily Anglophone in the other—but both identify, at the heart of modern and contemporary cultural production, an impulse to engage the death, decay, and decomposition that animate life. Kim and Tremblay will deliver remarks on each other's book, after which they will provide a response. A conversation with event attendees will follow. PDFs of excerpts from the books will be pre-circulated. Please use the following links for more information on the books: Cacaphonies and Breathing Aesthetics.

Annabel L. Kim is the Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. Kim is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first-century French fiction and the author of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions (Ohio State University Press, 2018) and Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2022), as well as the editor of a special issue of Diacritics (Vol. 48, no. 3, 2020) on the politics of citation.

Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at York University, where they teach and research across environmental and sexuality studies as well as modern and contemporary literary, screen, and performance cultures. They are the author of Breathing Aesthetics (Duke University Press, October 2022) and, with Andrew Strombeck, a coeditor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s (State University of New York Press, 2021).