The Novel and the Corpse

This talk follows the fate of the corpse in works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In Defoe’s vast oeuvre, the human corpse appears not as the sacred sign of irrecoverable loss but as an object to be salvaged—as yet another endlessly recyclable byproduct of human activity under capitalism. In this talk, I argue that the novel finally disengages from the pursuit of endless growth by emphasizing both the non-salvageability of the corpse and the importance of closure as a feature of novelistic form. Against the infinite reconfiguration of materials that capitalism sustains, the novel tasks itself with delivering the kind of resting place that is precisely unavailable in the world outside of the text.











When: Thu., Oct. 29, 2020 at 12:45 pm - 2:00 pm
Where: Columbia University
116th St. & Broadway
212-854-1754
Price: Free
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This talk follows the fate of the corpse in works of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction, beginning with Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722). In Defoe’s vast oeuvre, the human corpse appears not as the sacred sign of irrecoverable loss but as an object to be salvaged—as yet another endlessly recyclable byproduct of human activity under capitalism. In this talk, I argue that the novel finally disengages from the pursuit of endless growth by emphasizing both the non-salvageability of the corpse and the importance of closure as a feature of novelistic form. Against the infinite reconfiguration of materials that capitalism sustains, the novel tasks itself with delivering the kind of resting place that is precisely unavailable in the world outside of the text.

Buy tickets/get more info now