C.J. Hribal: Hope and Failure: A Meditation on Being in Two Places at Once (January 2021)

We’ve all felt it: that we are absolutely on to something in our current story or novel or poem, followed immediately (if not felt simultaneously) by the certainty that the work is absolutely beyond salvaging..Hribal’s lecture examines blended emotions in fiction and poetry, particularly when those emotions aren’t opposing binaries so much as they are aslant, the bundling of contrapuntal impulses—and why that might actually be a good thing.