Awkwardness: A Poetics of Comparative Unease

The Centre for Comparative Literature and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures welcomes Professor Alexander Regier (Department of Modern and Classical Literatures and Cultures, RICE University) to the University of Toronto to give a public lecture. The event is organized by Professor James and Professor Zilcosky.

“Awkwardness” is a rich concept: people, situations, and ideas can be awkward, but so can be furniture arrangements, sentences, or smiles. In this talk I propose that awkwardness is also a significant but largely unrecognized category that structures many texts from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. I will show that awkwardness compels us to think comparatively and urges us to develop a particular attention to politics and aesthetics that is exceedingly precise and sensitive to our historical moment.