“'These sentences will gather': Gladman’s Architectural Poetics," a Lecture by Laura Kathryn Nelson

Writer and visual artist Renee Gladman traverses mediums to think about the relationship between language and architecture. Her drawings—sentences that take the form of cityscapes—are a companion to her fiction, including her recent series of novellas set in a fictional city in crisis. In both mediums, Gladman’s syntax—often breaking, rupturing, running away, wandering off—constitutes an uncanny architecture. Read together, her novels and images ask how language and architecture might provide provisional structures for collective forms within (and against) ecological-capitalist crisis. In this talk, I hope to think alongside Gladman’s architectural poetics. How do the sentences in her novels and drawings blueprint, gesture, assemble, and write toward social “infrastructures for troubling times” (Lauren Berlant), “black study in the undercommons” (Fred Moten and Stefano Harney), and “the political unconscious of architecture” (Fredric Jameson)? How do they invite practices of gathering?

Laura Nelson is an Assistant Professor of English at Princeton, where she teaches courses on media studies, radical pedagogies, and contemporary literature and film. Her current book project,After School: Collective Experiments in Art, Study, and Education, looks at different formations of study outside traditional schools and universities from the 1920s to the 1980s. Over the last few years, she has taught in many non-traditional settings, including at Deep Springs College and Tidelines Institute. Alongside teaching, she co-organizes experimental sites of learning, including projects like Place Settings, the Oakland Summer School, and the Library of Study.

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