Description: Vincent Bruyere offers an invitation to look at the present we live in through a fresh lens: the difference between storage and burial in the age of sustainability science. He reflects on the nature and significance of perishability in a culture of preparedness and survival.
Brief description: Vincent Bruyere (PhD, French Studies, Warwick) is Assistant Professor of French Studies, cross-listed with the Studies in Sexualities Program and the Disability Studies Initiative, and Co-Director of Graduate Studies, French and Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is the author of La différence Francophone: De Jean Léry à Patrick Chamoiseau (Rennes, 2012) and has also published essays in Mosaic, Symplokè, Diacritics, and Esprit Créateur.
Review Quotes: 'Don't not open this book! You will never tire of it'--In the spirit of those fairy tale warnings, whose vagaries of reception Vincent Bruyère teaches us to remember, I am tempted to proclaim this of a book that will change how we understand the contemporary status of the perishable and exhausted in a world that blurs the difference between burial for all time and storage for some future date. Perishability Fatigue opens a slender path from the Ovidian story of Myrrha--transformed into a tree at the point of giving birth--to contemporary cases of stopped time, immobilized fertility, destructive preservation, and disturbed, bracketed or negated futurity, from seed banks to frozen embryos, from survivors of stroke to biomedical remnants, from the interminable time of nuclear waste to the short meantime of palliative care. In the elegance with which he weaves together contemporary examples with classical and early modern sources, Bruyère goes against the grain of his own argument, according to which terminal capitalism interrupts and suspends possibilities of ordinary transience and transmission. Modeling a beautiful form of continuity in time all its own, his reading practice is evidence that by some miracle literature's paroles en l'air have not been preserved in vain.--Anne-Lise François, UC Berkeley