“What do fashion theories contribute to literary studies? What explains the preoccupation of realist fiction with the sartorial appearances of its female characters, from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary to Jean Rhys’ Good Morning, Midnight!? Currently re-reading novels through the lens of these questions, I use the notion of the novelist as clotheshorse, as a frame for thinking through the novel’s descriptive voice(s). Because the clotheshorse is both a simple frame on which clothes are hung out to dry and, figuratively speaking, a person whose main function appears to be to show off clothes, the novelist as narrator emerges as an ambivalent describer of the obvious and the conspicuous.”

The presentation promises to be of interest to those working in gender studies and/or cultural studies as well as more literary types. Hope you can join us in the Walden Emerson room (that’s the one in the basement); refreshments from 4, talk starts around 4:15, discussion to follow. Come as you are.