Whenever you teach a class or present your scholarship, you’re a performer: you want to capture the audience’s attention and transform its stance toward your topic. How can you make your audience lean forward, eager to follow the intellectual journey you’re leading—even when they know nothing about your field? This interactive workshop will offer accessible strategies from theater, voice training, and improv to help you engage your students and colleagues. Whether you’re teaching your first section or entering the 3MT competition, you can learn to use your voice, body, and environment more effectively to make your performance click. Please bring a short description of a topic that you anticipate needing to teach or present.

Read and discuss Tom Eyers' new book Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Northwestern UP, 2017)

Speculative Formalism engages decisively in recent debates in the literary humanities around form and formalism, making the case for a new, nonmimetic and antihistoricist theory of literary reference. Where formalism has often been accused of sealing texts within themselves, Eyers demonstrates instead how a renewed, speculative formalism can illuminate the particular ways in which literature actively opens onto history, politics, and nature, in a connective movement that puts formal impasses to creative use.

 

Through a combination of philosophical reflection and close rhetorical readings, Eyers explores the possibilities and limits of deconstructive approaches to the literary, the impact of the “digital humanities” on theory, and the prospects for a formalist approach to “world literature.” The book includes sustained close readings of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Yeats, and Wallace Stevens, as well as Alain Badiou, Paul de Man, and Fredric Jameson.