BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//132.216.98.100//NONSGML kigkonsult.se iCalcreator 2.20.4//
BEGIN:VEVENT
UID:20260308T035422EDT-6765MVLDfX@132.216.98.100
DTSTAMP:20260308T075422Z
DESCRIPTION:The Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism welcome to you 
 a Disability and Human Right Initiative talk with Michael Snediker (Univer
 sity of Houston)\,  a well-known poet and a scholar of American literature
  and disability theory.\n\nAbstract\n\nWhen it comes to Henry James’s orde
 al of chronic pain\, critics have either minimized it or treated it as an 
 open secret in chiastic relation to the privative subject of his sexuality
 . No matter the interpretive tack\, these efforts have been uniformly draw
 n to what James’s 1914 autobiography\, Notes of a Son and Brother\, indeli
 bly\, infamously denominates an “obscure hurt” sustained by an adolescent 
 James in the already over-determined days leading up to the Civil War.\n\n
 The estimable challenge of recovering the terms of this formulation from t
 he further obscurity of James’s later\, mystifying account of it has led c
 ritics to understand the former as a synecdochal black box of sorts for th
 ose elements in James’s life least responsive to conventional scrutiny. Ja
 mes and his autobiographical record of the event continue accordingly to b
 e treated as though they were not only unable\, but also practically unwil
 ling to yield some more legible kernel of meaning\, giving way instead - i
 f at all - to only a further sense of the inaccessible.\n\nInappreciable a
 s the difference may seem\, these pages redirect our attention away from t
 he historical injury that Notes of a Son and Brother putatively chronicles
  to the lush complexities\, all those decades later\, of the latter’s late
  style. In doing so\, it follows James’s own lead in softening the hard li
 ne conventionally drawn between actual and textual phenomenality\, tracing
  those moments in James’s writing where the impactful convergence of these
  otherwise incommensurable phenomenal fields shares a repertoire\, an aest
 hetic principle\, with the queerness of chronic pain as a distinctly figur
 ative event.\n\nAbout the speaker\n\nMichael D. Snediker teaches courses i
 n early American Literature\, Transcendentalism\, Henry James\, Modernism\
 , Poetics\, Queer Theory\, Disability Theory\, and Aesthetics.\n\nHe is th
 e author of Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and other Felicitous Persuasi
 ons (U.Minnesota Press\, 2009)\, which was nominated for the MLA First Boo
 k Prize\, the Alan Bray Prize\, and Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Prize
 . His second critical book\, a reading of disability theory and aesthetics
  across the very long American 19th century\, is titled Contingent Figure:
  Aesthetic Duress from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (under
  contract\, U. Minnesota Press).\n\nHe's also a published poet who has bee
 n a resident at both the James Merrill House (Stonington\, CT) and Yaddo (
 Saratoga Springs\, NY). His most recent book of poems\, the Apartment of T
 ragic Appliances\, was published in 2013 by Punctum Books. His next book o
 f poetry\, The New York Editions\, is a translation of Henry James's novel
 s into lyric poems.\n
DTSTART:20171124T223000Z
DTEND:20171124T223000Z
LOCATION:NCDH 202\, Chancellor Day Hall\, CA\, QC\, Montreal\, H3A 1W9\, 36
 44 rue Peel
SUMMARY:Henry James’s “Obscure Hurt” - Chronic Pain as Figurative Being
URL:/law/channels/event/henry-jamess-obscure-hurt-chro
 nic-pain-figurative-being-282265
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR