Oral Presentations
Ninety Seconds to Midnight
Presentation Type
Presentation
Faculty Mentor’s Full Name
Robert Stubblefield
Faculty Mentor’s Department
English
Abstract / Artist's Statement
Ninety Seconds to Midnight
Ninety Seconds to Midnight is a series of five creative nonfiction essays. The project emphasizes form: the essays operate in a narrative mode, with each essay building on another and building on the white space that separates one essay from another. Topically, the essays cover language as a thing given and received, as well as Christian eschatology.
This theology of finality opens up the question of temporal borders, where one time ends and another begins. But the edges of an epoch aren’t clearly definable, and requires some imagination. By exploring this imagination, the essays likewise think through a psyche.
Language, on the level of the sentence, also deals with categories. Subjects, verbs, objects, and in a declarative sentence, the period. There is an invisible fifth thing, the reconstruction of the sentence in the mind of the reader, or writer. The five essays are modeled after these, turning the large scale conception of the project into form of a sentence. Content-wise, there is an emphasis on embodiment of language. That is, when someone says something, whatever is spoken came from a person. Finding oneself within an interwoven web of knowledge, of language and the people that speak it, allows for a more secure sense of place and voice.
Category
Humanities
Ninety Seconds to Midnight
UC 333
Ninety Seconds to Midnight
Ninety Seconds to Midnight is a series of five creative nonfiction essays. The project emphasizes form: the essays operate in a narrative mode, with each essay building on another and building on the white space that separates one essay from another. Topically, the essays cover language as a thing given and received, as well as Christian eschatology.
This theology of finality opens up the question of temporal borders, where one time ends and another begins. But the edges of an epoch aren’t clearly definable, and requires some imagination. By exploring this imagination, the essays likewise think through a psyche.
Language, on the level of the sentence, also deals with categories. Subjects, verbs, objects, and in a declarative sentence, the period. There is an invisible fifth thing, the reconstruction of the sentence in the mind of the reader, or writer. The five essays are modeled after these, turning the large scale conception of the project into form of a sentence. Content-wise, there is an emphasis on embodiment of language. That is, when someone says something, whatever is spoken came from a person. Finding oneself within an interwoven web of knowledge, of language and the people that speak it, allows for a more secure sense of place and voice.