Professor Rebecca Oh

Thurs, 12:30 - 02:50 PM

Genre and infrastructure are both structuring forms that shape how things will go. Generic properties shape emplotment, likely or unlikely events, types of characters, and readerly expectations; genre organizes both narrative elements and the relations between them. Likewise, infrastructures are sociotechnical systems that organize and distribute both things and the relations between them, whether by enabling or blocking the movement of people, ideas, and objects. This seminar will consider the affordances of genre for infrastructure and of infrastructure for genre, asking how these structuring forms are taken up in global South literature. We become familiar with theories of genre and theories of infrastructure from both the humanities and the social sciences, considering how genres are deployed to probe the experiences, ideas, promises and pitfalls of infrastructure. How do literary genres critique, reveal, and theorize the spatial, temporal, and embodied distributions of infrastructure? How does genre work like the “infrastructure of infrastructure”? In turn we will consider the aesthetic properties of infrastructure, the way built forms like roads, houses, cars, and sewers shape bodily movement and comportment, impact sensory perceptions, accrue affects and symbolism, produce subjectivities, and facilitate generic expectations about the world. We will also consider how both these structuring forms index the environmental, racial, gendered, political, and economic forces that have shaped the global South.