Keynote Address
Saturday, March 23rd
11:30 AM - 1:30 PM
Zoom link: http://tinyurl.com/IUgradconference1
Quincy University
Sean Grattan
Sean Grattan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Quincy University. He is the author of Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature (University of Iowa Press, 2017). His work has recently appeared in edited collections like Life In Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), The City in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2021), and Noir Affect (Fordham University Press, 2020). He is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Aesthetics of the Fucked.
University of Mary Washington
Kate Haffey
Kate Haffey is an Associate Professor at the University of Mary Washington in the Department of English and Linguistics. Her areas of expertise include twentieth and twenty-first-century literature, feminism, and queer theory. She is the author of Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality: Eddies in Time (2019). More recently her work has turned toward ecocriticism, posthumanism, and the goblincore aesthetic.
"How to Do Things with Goblins:
(Notes Towards a Goblin Theory)"
Taking the concept of “goblin mode” as a starting point, this talk, presented by Dr. Sean Grattan, will ask what does it mean to theorize like a goblin? Combinatory, furtive, hoarding and horde-ing, goblin aesthetics and goblin theorizing flits through the underbrush, reusing, rehashing, and recycling at a time when the privileging of immediacy, individuality, and consumption intersects with anthropogenic climate chaos. This talk will take seriously what going full-goblin in our reading practices might look like and what might be gained by figuring the goblin as a methodological model.
Following Dr. Grattan's presentation, Dr. Haffey and Dr. Grattan will engage in dialogue before inviting questions and comments from the audience.