Thursday, April 26th, 3-5 pm, Room 5409 – Laura Frost (New School) – “The Problem of Pleasure: Stein’s Tickle”

The CUNY Graduate Center Twentieth Century Area Studies Group Speaker Series Spring 2012

Laura Frost at the CUNY Graduate Center

Thursday, April 26th, 3-5 pm, Room 5409

The Problem of Pleasure: Stein’s Tickle

This talk will consider the nature of Steinian pleasure:  that is, whether and how her works give pleasure, and what kind of pleasure it is they might give.  Even Stein’s greatest admirers concede that much of her work is insurmountably obscure or unduly demanding.  Yet there has been a strong turn in recent Stein criticism toward interpreting her as a purveyor of sensuous pleasure that is secured by her abstraction and indeterminacy.  The same formal features that were deemed annoying or confusing have increasingly been read as the source of Stein’s appeal.  Looking at Stein’s experimental work from 1914 to her interwar lectures of the mid-1930s, and comparing her complex pleasures to high modernists such as Joyce and Eliot, Frost offers a new model for approaching the delights and difficulties of her texts: tickling.   Both infantile and erotic, delight-inducing and irritating, intersubjective and automatic, tickling is a social and neurobiological peculiarity whose character illuminates Stein’s methods and her reading effects as well as our notions of modernist difficulty.

Laura Frost is associate professor of literature at The New School.  The author of Sex Drives:  Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism (Cornell University Press), she has also published articles on James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, and Anita Loos, and essays on the cultural impact of 9/11.  Her most recent book, The Problem of Pleasure:  Modernism and Its Discontents, is under contract with Columbia University Press.

Sponsored by the 20th Century Studies Student Area Group (A DSC Chartered Organization)

CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street, diagonally across from Empire State Building), Room 5409.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.