Stacey Margolis
University of Utah
Stacey Margolis is Professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of The Public Life of Privacy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Duke, 2005) and Fictions of Mass Democracy in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, 2015), and is currently co-editor (with Elizabeth Duquette) of J19.
This panel brings together four scholars working on projects with a material focus to discuss the historical, methodological, and cultural possibilities that such a focus enables. While each presenter will focus on the... [ view full abstract ]
This panel brings together four scholars working on projects with a material focus to discuss the historical, methodological, and cultural possibilities that such a focus enables. While each presenter will focus on the specific possibilities raised by their own material, all will also reflect on the following questions:
- What forms of life were imagined to be possible in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century U.S. writing?
- What cultural, ethical, biological, and political possibilities did objects, bodies, climates, and physical environments provoke eighteenth- and nineteenth-century persons to imagine?
- What untapped archival or critical possibilities does the "material turn" afford or obscure?
To foster a more lively discussion, presenters will pre-circulate papers among panel participants, and keep papers to a maximum of 12 to 15 minutes, leaving plenty of time for audience participation.
Stacey Margolis, "Human Resources: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of Intergenerational Ethics." This paper considers the nineteenth-century roots of a contemporary fantasy about children that I will link to our current sense of obligation to future generations. This fantasy—really more of a collective nightmare—is about farming children for organs, or, more generally, sacrificing their bodies for the well-being of their elders. Strange, but hardly rare, this desire to imagine children as human resources underwrites a number of very different contemporary novels, from the realism of My Sister's Keeper to the YA fantasy of The Hunger Games, to the more ambitious experimental fiction of Never Let Me Go. These novels, I argue, reconceptualize the nineteenth-century "image of the black body as an edible object" (as Kyla Wazana Tompkins recently put it) in order to transform our received notion of responsibility to the future into a more pointed depiction of hostility towards and competition with future people.