Writing, Feeling, and the History of Flow with Sarah Mesle
Wednesday, March 11, 12–2pm | Valentine Overlook, 5280 Clifton Court Hall | Register
This talk puts two problems in dialogue: first, the private misery many academics experience on a given day spent hoping our writing will “flow,” and second, the public challenge of explaining why academic expertise matters now, when so many of higher education’s resources have been blocked. These two problems bridge several perceived divides: individual and social, emotional and rational, psychological and political. Such divides are so familiar we can forget they have histories. But, they do. Indeed, the river city of Cincinnati— with its particular relation to the global flows of water, immigrants, industrial products, and ideas—has played a significant role in those histories. Taking Cincinnati as a case study, and drawing on her recent book Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now, Mesle explores how personal feelings have material, trackable, and transformable connections to our communities. She further proposes that humanists’ skills— such as our ability to historicize seemingly ephemeral experiences, like bad writing feelings— make us uniquely suited to addressing the broader crises of our period.