Overview
Britton Edelen is a doctoral candidate in English literature, working primarily on European Modernism in English, French, and German. With a comparatist background and an interest in 20th-century continental philosophy, his research, broadly conceived, attends to moments of linguistic failure, negativity, and dissolution and the ethical horizons opened by aesthetic objects.
Britt's dissertation project, "Language Worked Over: Thermodynamic Modernism and the Poetics of Exhaustion," traces the aesthetic legacies of the thermodynamic sciences in modernist writing through the figuration, formalization, and inscription of exhaustion. Through readings of several canonical modernist writers—Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Woolf, Beckett, and Celan—this dissertation examines how writers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries incorporated the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which describe the conservation and degradation of energy, into their aesthetic practices and theories. In doing so, modernist authors participated in the discourses of exhaustion that proliferated during the period due to the cultural dissemination of thermodynamics. Rather than uncritically duplicating popular industrial capitalist theories of exhaustion as a cultural menace, however, the writers examined in this project refigured exhaustion as the proper telos of aesthetic experience. Ultimately, this project seeks to examine the relation between scientific thought and literary production, arguing for a broader definition of modernism that posits the movement as inextricably bound up with the thermodynamic thought that emerged alongside it within the period. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical sources—experimental linguistics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, economics, and the philosophy of science—Britt's dissertation seeks not to discern how language works, but how it works on us, exhausts us, and the ethico-political implications that come with the fatigue of the speaking subject.
Britt holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University, where he graduated with honors after completing a thesis on philosophical and aesthetic figurations of talking animals. Currently, he co-convenes the Psychoanalysis Now! Reading Group, sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.
Britt's dissertation project, "Language Worked Over: Thermodynamic Modernism and the Poetics of Exhaustion," traces the aesthetic legacies of the thermodynamic sciences in modernist writing through the figuration, formalization, and inscription of exhaustion. Through readings of several canonical modernist writers—Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Woolf, Beckett, and Celan—this dissertation examines how writers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries incorporated the first and second laws of thermodynamics, which describe the conservation and degradation of energy, into their aesthetic practices and theories. In doing so, modernist authors participated in the discourses of exhaustion that proliferated during the period due to the cultural dissemination of thermodynamics. Rather than uncritically duplicating popular industrial capitalist theories of exhaustion as a cultural menace, however, the writers examined in this project refigured exhaustion as the proper telos of aesthetic experience. Ultimately, this project seeks to examine the relation between scientific thought and literary production, arguing for a broader definition of modernism that posits the movement as inextricably bound up with the thermodynamic thought that emerged alongside it within the period. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical sources—experimental linguistics, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, economics, and the philosophy of science—Britt's dissertation seeks not to discern how language works, but how it works on us, exhausts us, and the ethico-political implications that come with the fatigue of the speaking subject.
Britt holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University, where he graduated with honors after completing a thesis on philosophical and aesthetic figurations of talking animals. Currently, he co-convenes the Psychoanalysis Now! Reading Group, sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute.