Jordan Scott, English Department
February 5, 2025, 1pm
Hoffman Room, Swan Hall; in person only

In 2002, critic B. R. Myers wrote about “the cult of the sentence,” a term meant to disparage writers who uphold the beauty of writing at the sentence level above other tenets of writing, such as character and plot. In this talk, Jordan Scott will upend this pejorative to discuss the unit of the sentence as what Garielle Lutz calls the “vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude.” Scott’s talk will highlight writers who embody this practice to demonstrate how understanding the sentence’s agility is crucial to the craft of fiction-writing.

Part of Scott’s research is on speculation, the fantastic, and estranging the ordinary. Understanding the possibility of the sentence (and how to contort it) is an aspect of their larger scholarship on the fantastic. Additionally, as a creative writer who is working on a dissertation novel, Scott embodies some of this practice in their own work.