This article examines the dissolution of the centre as a fecund literary frame of reference. Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport” (2019) is a novel that is written on the precipice of crisis. It is an experimental novel of (mostly) one sentence that documents a contemporary crisis of distraction so engrossing that we do not have time to acknowledge its magnitude.
View More Now “The Fact That” ThenAuthor: Hannah Karmin
Hannah Karmin is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She received a BA from Yale University in 2012 and completed a post-baccalaureate in Classics at Columbia University in 2013. Her dissertation, titled “Lapsed Attentions, Classical and Modern”, investigates patterns of attention and distraction in James Joyce and Homer, Virginia Woolf and Euripides, and H.D. and Callimachus. She is currently working on a final chapter on contemporary, feminine (in)attention in the works of Anne Carson and Lucy Ellmann.