Surrender as Method, Subject, and Experience: Doing the Work that Undoes Us

Nov 10, 2020 at 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM

Jessica Restaino (Montclair State University)

In her award-winning book Surrender: Feminist Rhetoric and Ethics in Love and Illness, Restaino takes up a two-year ethnography project with friend and collaborator Susan Lundy Maute, through the last two years of Maute’s life with terminal breast cancer. This public lecture introduces a series of core concepts from Surrender: “cut pieces,” which can represent messy and destabilized researcher-writer subjectivities and the uncertain texts produced when we are engaged with work that overwhelms us; “misfit tools,” which are rhetorical guide posts for identifying methods that disrupt traditional expectations for how and why we do our work; and finally “love” as a (difficult) concept that has a necessary place in research and writing work that pushes our most deeply-held boundaries.

This event is part of Syracuse Symposium’s year-long series on “Futures.” Co-sponsors include the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition and the Health Humanities Integrated Learning Major.