Laura Oulanne: Sense-Making and Selfhood Beyond Narratives: the Case of Gertrude Stein's Ida

Description

Laura Oulanne, a postdoctoral researcher in Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University at the Department of Political Science, will give a talk entitled "Sense-Making and Selfhood Beyond Narratives: the Case of Gertrude Stein's Ida" for the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute.

Abstract:

The idea of matter as a "site of narrativity" (Iovino & Opperman 2012) in material ecocriticism has lately been challenged as a limiting attempt to bring complex phenomena and processes within the bounds of narrative understanding that is defined by sequentiality and causality. Furthermore, the idea of identity and subjecthood as based on a life-narrative has been contested by some cognitive scientists as inaccurate and exclusive. This talk examines the alternatives that the experiential knowledge produced by literature, specifically descriptions and lists of material elements, might offer for narrativized forms of making sense of life and the world. I read Gertrude Stein's experimental take on the form of the novel in Ida (1941) to examine the encyclopedic digressions and descriptions of material things and environments that break the logic of causality and the sequentiality of a life narrative. I ask, what kind of readerly sense-making activity they invite in the reader, what kind of understanding they give rise to, and how they might help us think of the relationship between literature, matter, and life beyond anthropocentric categories.

During Oulanne's doctoral work, she developed a theory of reading affective materiality by studying the role of material things in Djuna Barnes's and Jean Rhys's short fiction. Her postdoctoral research explores the way modernist women writers create alternatives to internalist and individualist conceptions of the mind and the subject, rewriting the relationship between the human and the environment while challenging the gendered norms of society