Keynote Lecture

 

 

 

Keynote Lecture by Erica Fretwell 

Sense and Insensibility, ca 1900 and 2000

       This talk considers the sense-making that might derive, counterintuitively, from senselessness. The invention of general anesthetics in the mid-nineteenth century, which yielded the chemical control of unconsciousness, catalyzed a paradigm shift human ontology that, in the following decades and centuries we are still tarrying with: What is human life when consciousness (and with it, selfhood) is dead? This talk tracks that question across the literature of "unlived experience" that clusters around the turns of twentieth and the twenty-first century. Drawing on feminist and disability phenomenology, the history of science, and sense studies, I read Edith Wharton's fiction alongside Claudia Rankine and Ottessa Moshfegh to consider how the "oversleeper" -- unable to awaken but refusing to dream -- refigures insentience as a reprieve form the racialized and gendered demands of interiority. The counter-history of (Freudian) unconsciousness that general anesthetics offers, then, suggests that the flatlining of consciousness can function as a lifeline, a means for subjects to survive the normative fantasies that may not kill but form which recovery is not possible. At stake, then, in tracking the aesthetic life of senselessness is the pivotal role that insensibility plays in the intimate and embodied relations, performances, and practices that we otherwise call "sense-making."

Erica Fretwell is associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature, as well as affect theory, the history of science and medicine, and feminist and disability studies.
She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke, 2020), and her essays have appeared in the journals PMLA, American Literary History, and American Literature. She is currently writing a book on the literature of unlived experience, titled "The Art of Slight Living."