Join four feminist critics in conversation about how they love, hate, and compromise with the culture around us. In an imperfect cultural world, what compromises do we make to honor pleasure? How do the things that give us pleasure compromise our politics—or is it the other way around? Can our compromises, and the sometimes-guilty frisson of making them, become themselves pleasurable? Such questions percolate through two new books: Arielle Zibrak’s Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures and Rachel Greenwald Smith’s On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal. Potential conversational objects of guilt, compromise, and pleasure include but are not limited to: Axl Rose, “Unchained Melody,” seduction plots, white wine spritzers, Edith Wharton novels, Nancy Meyers movies, 4chan, Taylor Swift, fast food, Doc Martens, Judy Blume, online shopping, Poetry magazine, coalitional politics, and the feminist possibilities of “sing-alongs.”
Arielle Zibrak is Associate Professor of English and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wyoming. She is the author, most recently, of Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures (NYU Press, 2021), a critical memoir that explores her relationship to and the history of femme fictions ranging from 19th-century sentimental novels to 1970s bodice rippers to rom-coms and television.
Rachel Greenwald Smith is the author of On Compromise: Art, Politics, and the Fate of an American Ideal (Graywolf Press, 2021) and Affect and American Literature in the Age of Neoliberalism (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University, where she teaches courses on 20th and 21st century U.S. literature and critical theory.
Jane Hu is an English PhD at UC-Berkeley and a writer living in Oakland.
Lili Loofbourow is a staff writer at Slate.
Moderator: Sarah Mesle (USC) is Editor and Co-founder, Avidly and Avidly Reads.
Co-sponsored by the Seminary Co-op Bookstore.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
Date: November 15, 2021
Time: 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Date: November 15, 2021
Time: 7:00 PM - 8:00 PM