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Fleeting Forever: (Never)Ending Moments in Paradise, Housekeeping, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
- Author(s):
- Francisco Robles (see profile)
- Date:
- 2014
- Group(s):
- LLC 20th- and 21st-Century American, LLC African American, TC Cognitive and Affect Studies, TC Philosophy and Literature, TC Psychology, Psychoanalysis, and Literature
- Subject(s):
- American literature, Culture--Study and teaching, Ethics
- Item Type:
- Conference paper
- Conf. Title:
- University of Toronto Graduate Student Conference
- Conf. Org.:
- University of Toronto Department of English
- Tag(s):
- contemporary fiction, karen joy fowler, marilynne robinson, the sublime, toni morrison, Cultural studies
- Permanent URL:
- http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M65K5F
- Abstract:
- In this paper, I propose that certain works of contemporary fiction offer us novel ways of imagining “forever” that are specifically tied to momentary (and, often, arbitrary) acts of intimate connection. Considered together via their particular fashioning of “forever,” Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Karen Joy Fowler seem to offer a theory of the sublime that must to take into account the idea of impossibility as one of its primary modes of access. That is, by taking the fleeting moment and expanding it primarily through an act of imagination of the radical other, the three novels under consideration offer conclusions that conceptually and affectively render the moment into an impossibility that must nevertheless be incorporated into the totality of the narrative. In pushing us to consider these impossibilities, Paradise, Housekeeping, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves offer entryways for thinking ourselves into utopia, sublimity, and love as ethical concepts for moving through and conceptualizing the world.
- Metadata:
- xml
- Status:
- Published
- License:
- Attribution-NoDerivatives
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fleeting-forever-conference-edition.docx