Work-in-Progress Session: Insufficiency as World-Remaking: Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”

–presented by Joseph Torres, UCLA

Hosted by Helen Deutsch, Director and Professor of English, UCLA
Moderated by Lowell Gallagher, Professor of English, UCLA

This event is free of charge, but you must register to attend in advance. All audience members will receive instructions via email after registration. Click the following link to register directly with Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUvc–vrj0pGtQGDaQqzDu-1z-AJuL0xYw_

As part of our ongoing effort to sustain intellectual community and enable scholarly exchange, and in order to support and encourage the work many of us are doing in a range of public forums during this unprecedented time, the UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies and William Andrews Clark Memorial Library are hosting works-in-progress sessions and panel discussions online via Zoom during the 2020–21 academic year. Academic programs supported by the Center/Clark explore the latest research in the early modern period (including the long eighteenth century, which extends through the Romantic period) and in special areas represented in the Clark’s collections.

Joseph Torres analyzes the repertoire of tactics by which writers and their creations can alter, reform, or adapt extant worlds; he calls this process world-remaking. During this work-in-progress session, he will discuss how his prime case study, Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” takes a modal rather than binary perspective on human insufficiency; it revisits moments of failure from various received traditions, then deforms and displaces their components to recuperate and redeploy original textual meanings in uncanny ways. Because the world of Nun Appleton is recurrently remade in an unorthodox state of interfusion, he argues that “Upon Appleton House” exemplifies a vision of early modern poetic experimentalism that recognizes forms of failure as legitimate modes of world-remaking.

Joseph’s paper will be pre-circulated to registrants.

Joseph Torres is a second-year Ph.D. student in the UCLA Department of English. He received a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. Additionally, Joseph studied Renaissance texts, Latin translation, and digital humanities at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on modes of world-remaking in early modern English literature.