Jones Faculty Lecture by Professor Megan Fernandes

The End of the Line

In this talk, I consider the flailing subject. The one who loses her keys and cities. The fool. The forgetful speaker. The soft one who stays soft despite the world. The one who sits with the “elephant in the room” and keeps her company while others talk around our mutual haunting. This lecture explores Lauren Berlant’s “Poetics of Dissociation” and investigates what it means to make art from a position of loss and defense. Drawing on queer theory and a close reading of a sonnet by Diane Seuss, this talk travels from the classroom to a bar in upstate New York. Along the way, I consider the way our realities have been fragmented, undermined, and how the psychic estrangement of living under fascism constitutes new modes of political and poetic attention.

The talk is sponsored by the Thomas Roy and Lura Forest Jones Faculty Lecture and Awards Fund, established in 1966 to recognize superior teaching and scholarship at Lafayette College.