Monday, April 8 2019
Time: 3:30 P.M.
Lindsay Young Auditorium – UT Hodges Library
From Game of Thrones to The Revenant to Avengers Infinity War, recent American popular culture is brimming with visions of choice as a horror—a nightmarish negotiation of either/or options that characters are forced to endure in the name of survival. Across film, TV and literature, characters seem to have no choice but to choose who will survive, whose life they will trade for their own, or what they will lose to stay alive. In this talk, based on her recent academic monograph, Dr. Elliott offers an overview of and explanation for this fixation on the horror of choice and raises questions about the ways in which it is shaping American political discourse outside the realm of fiction and film.
Jane Elliott is Reader in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King’s College London. Her publications include The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics (2018), the edited collection Theory after ‘Theory’ (2011) and Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (2008).
Jane Elliott was invited to the University of Tennessee by Amy Elias (Department of English/UTHC).