Britt Edelen, Graduate Student  

Britt Edelen

Email Address: britton.edelen@duke.edu

Highlight:
Britt Edelen is a doctoral candidate in the English department, working primarily on European Modernism in English, French, and German. With a comparatist background and an interest in 20th-century continental philosophy, his research and teaching, broadly conceived, concern the play, limits, and politics of language and the ethical potential of aesthetic works.

Britt's dissertation project, tentatively titled "Language in Drift and Dissolution: Energetics, Exhaustion, and Modernist Poetics," explores poetic responses to the pneumatic crisis of modernity—that is, the discovery of thermodynamic principles and their application to human life. In this project, Britt reads various writers—Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Woolf, Beckett, and Celan—as concerned with the energetics of language and literature; in them, he identifies a "poetics of expenditure" that figures exhaustion as an artistic telos which challenges dominant (capitalist) discourses of exhaustion that seek to minimize it and make the Human absolutely efficient. Drawing on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and Marxism, 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.