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2025 Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS)
19–22 June 2025; Taipei, Taiwan
Abstract
In an 1877 letter to Sarah Tuckerman, Emily Dickinson shares her “timid happiness” that, as she describes, “adds to some bright total.” Included in this total are Dickinson’s botanical companions: “The immortality of Flowers must enrich our own, and we certainly should resent a Redemption that excluded them.” This line, which suggests that Dickinson includes the nonhuman in her sense of immortality, is also unusual: in the vegetal world, flowers are among the fastest perishing entity. We can easily read this metaphorically—flowers live on in our memory even after the plant itself dies—and much recent scholarship by Christine Gerhardt and Mary Kuhn has usefully revealed the layers of botanical thinking in Dickinson’s writing. However, I instead read this line in light of the morphology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In The Metamorphosis of Plants (1790), Goethe finds the Urpflanze in the form of the leaf: every piece of a plant, including its flower, is merely a metamorphosed leaf. For Goethe, vegetal life thus reveals the immortality of leaves. While Dickinson instead prioritizes the flower, I argue that her vision of plant life similarly conceives of immortality in this way: botanical forms metamorphosing over time, suggesting in the plant a feature of immortality that she traces in human experience and especially poetry. Turning to recent work in literary and cultural plant studies, especially the idea of vegetal cognition and “plant-thinking,” I suggest that in her letters Dickinson thinks with plants, whom she imbues with agency like Goethe and the metamorphosing plant or Henry David Thoreau and his “acquaintance” trees. Ultimately, I argue that Dickinson’s use of plants throughout her correspondence models a vegetal-focused empiricism that blends poetic language with botanical description, enabling plants to express their own agency—and immortality—to the reader.
2025 Modern Language Association (MLA)
9–12 January 2025; New Orleans, LA
Abstract
In 1884, Mark Twain joined the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) with a letter expressing his fascination with thought-transference. As Twain describes it, this “mental telegraphy” manifests as “powerful impulses” during writing, feeling as if someone is “supplying the thoughts to me, and that I am merely writing from dictation.” Although this “telepathy” would today be considered mere pseudoscience, Twain’s narratives of the experience point to an equally remarkable phenomenon: the transference of ideas via textual narratives. Research from reception theory, affect theory, and present-day neuroscience explores how ideas developed through reading are not passively absorbed from a text, but rather formed in the “gap” between text and reader. My paper explores Twain’s relation to turn-of-the-century psychology—his acquaintance with William James; his influence on Sigmund Freud—to demonstrate how Twain’s later speculative mode of writing reveals aspects of reading then unknown to psychological science. Focusing on his late, incomplete novel, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, I argue that the speculative mode is particularly apt for creating textual gaps that readers are encouraged to fill. Thus, I suggest that Twain contributes to turn-of-the-century psychology while exposing its limits: a lesson that we can bring to contemporary scientific approaches to reading.
2024 American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT)
23–25 October 2024; İzmir, Türkiye
Abstract
Throughout his career, Friedrich Nietzsche constantly read the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Despite only rarely referencing Emerson directly, Nietzsche’s copies of Emerson (in German translation) were heavily annotated and frequently perused. This fact is all the more remarkable since although Nietzsche famously soured on his other mentors—Schopenhauer, Wagner—he never stopped reading Emerson. In my paper, I highlight this relationship to analyze the phenomenon of re-reading: the shifting reception of a text by an ever-changing reader. Beginning with Emerson’s concept of “creative reading” from his 1837 lecture “The American Scholar” and what Henry David Thoreau says about “heroic reading” in Walden (1854), I show how a text’s meaning relies on the reader’s reception as much as it does on the creative writer. This mode of reading is what Ross Posnock and Richard Poirier call “troping,” or what Jane F. Thrailkill has more recently described as “play.” However, I argue that Emerson’s re-readability originates in his aphoristic mode, an open-ended style that encourages readers to become co-writers and co-inquirers. Receptive readers thus expand centrifugally from Emersonian ideas, drawing—as Emerson writes in his 1841 essay “Circles”—new, spiraling “circles” of thought. In other words, Emerson’s short, suggestive lines demand continual re-reading or “rumination,” which is Nietzsche’s description of the “art of the aphorism” in The Genealogy of Morals (1887). Ultimately, I suggest that aphoristic rumination, or re-reading, is a fundamental feature of the nineteenth-century American essay, where suggestive short forms demand continuous attention from receptive readers.
2024 American Literature Association (ALA)
23–26 May 2024; Chicago, IL
Abstract
William James’s corpus is bookended by nitrous oxide. One of his earliest publications was a review of Benjamin Paul Blood’s The Anæsthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), wherein Blood claims that the sensation of “coming to” out of nitrous oxide intoxication held ineffable truths for philosophy. In “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910), the final essay published during his lifetime, James praises Blood’s ideas by stringing together open-ended readings of his various texts and correspondence. James also personally experimented with nitrous oxide, famously using it to mock Hegelian ideas in an endnote to “On Some Hegelisms” (1882). James scholars tend to treat this as a biographical curiosity: Gerald E. Myers calls it a “‘peripheral’ experiment” and James Campbell places nitrous oxide alongside a slew of other mind-altering substances with which James experimented. In this presentation, I argue instead that James’s use of nitrous oxide, especially as a method of reading, is central to his approach to interpretation more generally. Just as nitrous oxide allows users to experience new streams of consciousness, James encourages his audience to read creatively by pulling together otherwise disparate ideas. He models this in “A Pluralistic Mystic” with extended quotations that string together passages from discrete Blood texts with no signal stronger than ellipses. By reading this essay alongside the James family’s playfulness and “weirdness,” I suggest that nitrous oxide and other mind-altering substances reflect what can appear naturally in the best kind of reading: an expanded attention to diverse streams of thought coming creatively together.
2024 European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu)
10–12 April 2024; Birmingham, UK
Abstract
My paper brings together two typically disparate features of the nineteenth century: the emergence of ecological science and the development of an open-ended aphoristic style. In contrast to the common English-language understanding of “aphorisms” as synonymous with pithy maxims, I trace an alternative tradition of expansive, open-ended aphorisms that emerged in German literature beginning in the late eighteenth century. This tradition originated with physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who kept Sudelbücher, or “waste-books,” full of suggestive notes and scientific aphorisms meant to inspire the reader to continue the experimental process. Scholars like J. P. Stern and Franz H. Mautner have identified the poetic nature of even the most scientific aphorisms, showing how aesthetic subjectivity expands the breadth of objective observation. Although research on the aphoristic tendencies of writers like Goethe and Alexander von Humboldt have been fruitful, scholars have yet overlooked the aphoristic (in this open-ended sense) writing of American ecologists like Henry David Thoreau and Susan Fenimore Cooper. I argue that these writers similarly approach nature from this poetic-scientific perspective which manifests in their writing as ambiguous, experimental aphorisms that disrupt systematic taxonomy in favor of continuous interpretation and rereading. By examining Thoreau’s Journal and Cooper’s Rural Hours, I illustrate how the aphorism and literary language generally was central to the emerging scientific discourse of nineteenth-century ecology. Recovering this aphoristic approach, I claim, disrupts the rigid disciplinarity of the sciences while also suggesting a more robust scientific-literary practice in our time of climate crisis and general science skepticism.