David Kurnick, “Phantom Populations, Queer Densities: Rhetorics of Number in 19th-Century Fiction” скачать в хорошем качестве

David Kurnick, “Phantom Populations, Queer Densities: Rhetorics of Number in 19th-Century Fiction”

The 19th century was haunted by the fact of the population explosion and by fears (most vividly and influentially expressed by Thomas Malthus) of its implications for human happiness. This talk by David Kurnick traces a powerful but under-studied counterfantasy in which the sublime largeness of the social world becomes a source of erotic magnetism. He explores how this eroticism, divorced from the telos of reproduction, was nurtured by the domain of fiction, conceptualized as a realm of proliferating populations available for various forms of perverse engagement. Examining 19th-century criticism as well as ideas of fictional characters’ inherent multiplicity in novels by George Eliot, Balzac, and Henry James, Kurnick argues that an eroticism of number was key not only to a nonphobic relation to population generally but also to the specific imagination of erotic minorities. 00:00:00 Introduction | Amanda Anderson 00:05:29 “Phantom Populations, Queer Densities: Rhetorics of Number in 19th-Century Fiction” | David Kurnick 00:49:33 The Singularity of “The Bostonians” | Q&A 00:54:28 Commodification and the Mathematical Sublime | Q&A 01:01:57 Types and Numbers | Q&A 01:08:45 Population and the Poetry of Numbers | Q&A 01:17:36 The Categorical and Population | Q&A 01:26:44 Samuel R. Delany and the City | Q&A Recorded on April 4, 2024. Presented by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities as part of the Sarah Cutts Frerichs Lecture series, named for Sarah Cutts Frerichs AM ’49 Ph.D. ’74.