For our next event of the Spring 2021 semester, we will be joined by Sarah Osment, a lecturer at New College of Florida who works on 20th- and 21st-century US literature, poetry and poetics, and environmental humanities. She is a founding coeditor of Hyped on Melancholy and a breath of fresh air on Twitter. To receive the pre-circulated paper and the zoom invitation for this session, please write to Mel Micir at mmicir@wustl.edu. We hope you’ll join us!

Abstract: What is an aesthetic atmosphere? How does one account for that which seems to reside neither squarely within an artwork nor outside it? And what critical purchase might this dimension of aesthetic experience offer in a moment marked by ecological crisis? This paper takes up these questions in the context of their treatment by two contemporary poets, Lisa Robertson and Cheena Marie Lo, for whom the term functions unevenly. Tracking the figural and material registers of atmosphere in The Weather (2001) and A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters (2016), I examine the genres of relationality and precarity signaled by this notoriously elusive dimension of aesthetic experience. To read these works in light of their atmospheric qualities is to attend to the still-unfolding histories of exclusion and dispossession entangled in the air; at the same time, it captures the inevitably mediated nature of the ecosystems they represent.