Nicole Raziya Fong, The Peak of a Singular Instance

This two-day symposium brings together work in progress by scholars from Concordia University, Queen’s University, and Emory University touching upon a common question: how does literature register the relationship between modern figures of the subject and the structural violence of modernity? From the confluence of post-Kantian idealism with the contradictions of the French and Haitian revolutions, through the passage from slavery through civil war to reconstruction in the United States, to the cataclysms of world war and genocide in the twentieth century, to the ruptures and ongoing impasses of decolonization, the status of the modern subject has been riven between theoretical developments, histories of domination, and practical struggles for liberation. Working across these contexts, our four presentations model different ways of addressing literature’s reckoning with the constitution of the subject amid modern histories of structural violence.

FRIDAY APRIL 3
12:00-2:00, Nathan Brown, “Race, Reference, and Colonial Modernity in Hölderlin’s Andenken”
3:00-5:00, Ronjaunee Chatterjee, "On the Diagrammatic"

SATURDAY APRIL 4
12:00-2:00, Stephen Ross, “Universalist Singularity: Celan, Yevtushenko, and ‘Babi Yar’“
3:00-5:00, Ronald Mendoza-de Jésus, “Narcissism in Crisis: Jamaica Kincaid’s Unworlds”

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Nathan Brown is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University. He is the author of Baudelaire’s Shadow: On Poetic Determination (Fordham 2026), Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique (Fordham 2021), and The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science and Materialist Poetics (Fordham 2017). His translation of The Flowers of Evil was published by Verso in 2025.

Ronjaunee Chatterjee is Associate Professor of English at Queen’s University. She is the author of Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Stanford UP, 2022), and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (2024). Her articles and essays have been published in PMLA, differences, Mediations, French Studies, Victorian Studies, and other venues. 

Stephen Ross is Associate Professor of English at Concordia University. He is author of Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetics of Nature (OUP, 2017) and co-editor of Global Modernists on Modernism (2020). He was co-editor of Modernism/modernity from 2021-25.

Ronald Mendoza-de Jésus is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of Catastrophic Historicism: Reading Julia de Burgos Dangerously (Fordham UP, 2023) and of articles on continental philosophy, deconstruction, and Caribbean studies in Qui Parle, Small Axe, CENTRO Journal, Diacritics, Discourse, Mosaic, the New Centennial Review, the Oxford Literary Review, and other journals.