Seeking Panelist for 2014 C19: Exploring Tex(x)ture in American Literature and Culture
This panel will explore the notion of texture in relation to nineteenth-century American literature and culture. In an essay titled "Outing Texture" Renu Bora distinguishes between texture as "the surface resonance or quality of an object or material" and texxture (two x's) as "the stuffness of material structure." Put differently, we can say that texxture denotes the historicity of texture, or the maker's marks. In Eve Sedgwick's rendering of Bora's concept, texxture is thought to be "the kind of texture that is dense with offered information about how, substantially, historically, materially, it came into being." We might then ask: how does the dialectic of texture/texxture influence literary productions and their reception?