Research Seminar Talk Dr Noreen Masud --- (University of Bristol) "Flatness, Focus and The Other: Some Questions"

How does one look at a flat landscape? Alternatively: how does one attend to something which cannot, or declines to, offer any focal points? And why might one want or need to? In this talk – the draft conclusion to my new monograph on flat landscapes in twentieth-century literature – I suggest that the authors I study, via their treatment of level landscapes, provide an ethical framework which helps us rethink the ways we know, and love, each other. I outline the novel modes of looking, encounter and relationship which – I argue – a flat landscape offers certain twentieth-century writers, distinguishing them in the process from forebears in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I then tentatively think through some ways in which flat landscapes, and the modes of encounter I have laid out, might provide precisely the new relational forms urgently ethically required of us, politically and interpersonally. Drawing on a mixed methodology, including an anecdotal account (incorporated with full consent and collaboration) of my relationship with a dear friend as they transitioned from binary to non-binary pronouns, I suggest some initial ways in which these flat-landscape models of relationship could help articulate such a cognitive journey, and – most importantly – underline its necessity across a range of domains.