“The Apartment and the Piano: Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012)”
Marta Figlerowicz is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Yale University. Her first book project, Irrelevant Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character, discusses French and British early modern and modernist novels that explore limits to how broadly particular persons can engage with their environments. Her second book project, entitled Spaces of Feeling, studies representations of emotional states and their relationship to philosophical thought or political action in mid-twentieth-century American, British, and French fiction and poetry. She is currently working on essays about contemporary queer poetry, Michael Haneke, Søren Kierkegaard, and the Marquis de Sade. With Padma Maitland and Christopher Patrick Miller, she is also editing a collaborative volume on new materialisms and affect theory entitled Object Emotions.
“Two Avant Gardes: London, 1914–Brunnenberg, Tirolo, 1960”
Jill Richards is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. She works across a number of 20th century genres and national traditions, with a particular emphasis in British modernism. Her book manuscript, Fire-Starters: Women’s Rights, Human Rights, and the International Avant-Gardes, is a feminist counter-history of rights and revolution. Moving from the military trials of the pétroleuse to queer resistance cells active during the Second World War, she argues that women’s movements and the avant-gardes offered one another a conceptual language to reimagine subjects exceptional to the “rights of man and citizen.” The project follows these dialogues through the revolutionary upheavals peppering the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ultimately locating, amongst women’s movements, early socialist currents, and avant-gardes, a radical alternative to liberal human rights discourses in formation at the same historical moment. Her second book project, Adolescence and Austerity, is a theory of young adult literature from the 1970s to the present.