Ronny Litvack-Katzman

ronny-headshot.jpg

I am a graduate student in the Department of English at Harvard University.

Research Interests

My research is motivated by the ambiguous “and” in literature and science, propelled by questions at the intersection of literary theory and the cultural study of science. While much of my research focuses on British science fiction in the long nineteenth century, my interests are not bound by period or genre, venturing from Romantic poetry to contemporary novels. My SSHRC-supported thesis work explored the use of frame narration as a strategy to make sense of the Darwinian unnatural in H.G. Wells’s scientific romances. My public scholarship includes digtial projects looking at the history of nineteenth century British newspapers and connecting humanities scholars with their peers in the sciences.

Professional Interests

Coincident with my academic work, I am interested in science communication, academic publishing, and information-communication systems. I have served on a number of editorial boards in both editing and production roles.

Outside of work, I write poetry which I share primarily through Instagram, but can also be found in Yolk and Garbage Day. I am working to self-publish a chapbook in 2024.

news

Mar 14, 2024 Paper. ACLA 2024. Seminar: Proof. Hardy’s Novel Science
Mar 07, 2024 Seminar. NeMLA 2024. Frame Narratives: Then and Now
The frame narrative has often been theorized as the vestibule of a text, an “undefined zone” between an inner story and outside world. The interplay between narrative levels and their mediation vis-à-vis the frame invites confrontation with historically situated questions of presence and absence, of authority and trust, of naming and anonymity. When taken as a formal index of literary change, the ubiquity of frames across periods and genres offers significant insights into the historical contingency of such confrontations.

If frame narratives provide a useful site of narratological inquiry at the intersection of New Formalism (Levine, Levinson, Kramnick & Nersessian) and New Historicism (Foucault, Greenblatt, Vesser), this seminar seeks papers that explore how changing cultural conditions inform the possibility, formation, and stability of narrative frames, broadly construed.

This seminar asks us to consider the characteristics of the frame at various historical junctures: To what extent does the frame prove able to keep pace with shifting modes of cultural production and reception? Does the frame retain narrative integrity in the post-digital age? If the frame once felt idiosyncratically literary, how might we map our understanding onto new and emerging narratives and objects?

Possible topics might include:
  • Frames as structures of and structuring narratological authority
  • The frame as a specific type of beginning or ending, as a form of entry or closure
  • How frames translate across genres
  • Frames in/as metafiction
  • Paratext as framing
  • Reading canonical frames today
  • The interplay between frames and contemporary technologies

    • In conversation with NeMLA’s 2024 theme, “surplus,” we welcome papers that question the positionality of frames as “outside” the story or extraneous to diegesis proper and thus a form of excess.
    Oct 06, 2023 Symposium Paper. Center for Mark Twain Stuides. Science Fiction at the Boundary of Genre [SLIDES]
    Mar 25, 2023 Conference Paper. NeMLA 2023: The Everyday Beyond Description [SLIDES]
    Mar 18, 2023 Conference Paper. Concordia Colloquium Unnatural Narratives of Natural Science
    Feb 17, 2023 Talk. Showcase HN / DH Showcase 2023, News and Novel Sensations: A Digital Dive into Victorian Print Culture
    Jan 11, 2023 Event. Ciphers of The Times Vernissage: News and Novel Sensations
    Introduction to the virtual and physical exhibition, taking place in the McLennan Library from January to March 2023.
    Nov 24, 2022 Event. In conversation with Kevis Goodman
    The STS Working Group invites you to an upcoming proseminar entitled “Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics and Poetics,” featuring Professor Kevis Goodman, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Goodman will be discussing her forthcoming book, Pathologies of Motion (Yale, 2022) as a way to open up larger questions of the ambiguous “and” in “science and literature” – how does one study them in a way that doesn’t just involve analogy, or shared themes? What do these questions look like when one is studying these texts at a moment when “science” and “literature” were not, in fact, different disciplines?
    The basic question I want to raise concerns how our understanding of aesthetics and poetics… might change when we consider them not in terms of medicine’s healing aspirations and palliative adjustments but in terms of the work of pathology… where medical pathology was the knowledge of the multiple conditions of existence in their sensuous or surface effects. —Kevis Goodman from Pathologies of Motion
    The seminar will take place via Zoom on Thursday, November 24 from 2:00 – 4:00pm. Graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and faculty are all welcome to attend.