Sarah Nooter (University of Chicago) and Mario Telò (UC Berkeley), “The World and its Unworlding in Pindar and Apuleius” (Comparative Literature)

The departments of Comparative Literature and Classics warmly invite you to our annual Adam and Anne Amory Parry Lecture on April 9, which will be given by Sarah Nooter (University of Chicago) and Mario Telò (UC Berkeley). Their lecture is titled, “The World and its Unworlding in Pindar and Apuleius.” 

 

Abstract (Sarah Nooter)

 

This paper examines poetry as a tool of worldbuilding that simultaneously constructs its own unworlding by exposing the queer waste, erotic effluence, and minatory remainders of these constructions. It examines odes of Pindar, focusing on his shunned and disruptive figures—Typhoeus and the Gorgons. These are viewed as monstrous forces that deal in affective breaks within larger timelines and structures, narratives framed as ecological or even cosmological. Sometimes these breaks come through the experience of sound, sometimes in the form of liquid overflow, sometimes in a portrait of erotic deviance as escape, and always with a sense of excess that is singular and separate. They have bodies that overflow and expose the openness of any one body to another, bodies that intimate the threat of dissolution that underlies the worldly constructions of ancient and modern culture.

 

Abstract (Mario Telò)

 

Reconsidering Edward Said’s reflections on late style, this paper explores the homology between the stylistic surface of Apuleius’s exorbitant novelistic prose, bearing an excessive verbal cumulation, and the back of the donkey. What calls itself the world cruelly gathers itself around the beast of burden, which it always bears insofar as it can be endlessly beaten, like Apuleius’s donkey, the target of a narrative conspiracy, in which the reader is invited to collude. When we read Apuleius’s novel in these genocidal times, we perceive that its overarching narrative conceit is built upon the necropolitical denial of the ultimate translatio, death, figured in the text’s own “untranslatability,” its formal predisposition not to let itself be brought beyond itself. A refusal to bear, to bring a cargo to the expected destination, Apuleius’s untranslatability is also the figuration of an intransigent attachment to form, which makes us see a world unworlded, collapsing, unborne by its burdened (de)animalized support. 

 

We hope you can attend this exciting event!