Simon Reader on Gissing's notes, with Patrick Keilty

Join us this Thursday, October 2nd at 5:15 pm for the first seminar in our year-long series on nineteenth-century knowledge organization practices and information culture:

Simon Reader’s “ ‘Queer Little Experiences’: George Gissing’s Notes”

with a response by Patrick Keilty

Simon’s paper explores George Gissing’s investment in minimal acts of documentation, both in his Commonplace Book and in his published works. Notes offer Gissing a way of staying tethered to life amid decaying ethical ideals, if only in the drift of the present that may not be headed anywhere and that may not add up to anything.

Simon Reader is a Fellow in English at Harvard University. He completed his PhD in English and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto earlier this year. His current book project, Note for Note: The Aesthetics of Inquiry, argues for the coherence of the notebook as a genre, drawing on an eclectic group of writers from the late-eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Patrick Keilty is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto and Instructor in the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies there. His primary teaching and research field is culture and technology, with a particular focus on database logic, visual culture, gender, sexuality, and critical theory. His monograph project considers how embodied engagements with labyrinthine qualities of database design mediate aesthetic objects and structure sexual desire in ways that abound with expressive possibilities.