Professor David B Hobbs: Keynote for Guest Lecture Series in Ottawa
Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, Marlen Haushofer’s The Wall, Guido Morselli’s Dissipatio H.G., David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, and Anna de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over are all narrated by “endlings” — the term biologists use to denote the final living members of a soon-to-be-extinct species — and thereby inhabit the imagined position of the conventional lyric poem, in which a solitary mind in quiet reflection expresses personal feelings and speaks to an absent or abstract addressee. Professor Hobbs’s talk asked: what would it mean to call these novels “apostrophes,” and how might the protocols of lyric reading push us to understand them differently? To do so, he explored what these novels do with the concept of duration, how they narrates departures from gender norms, how they depict becoming "closer" to the animal world while bringing language to it, and finally, what kind of political goal that a sustained texture of loneliness might serve.