This panel investigates various literary and paraliterary "objects"--experimental literary forms, virtual literature, media-writing, and computational poetics--that complicate traditional modes of reading, distribution, analysis, and critique. Such works clearly extend the definition of a “literary object” in ways that confound the easy contextualism of traditional historicist analysis. At the same time, they pose challenges to more recent theoretical paradigms, such as the various forms of new materialism. Taking the latter as our conceptual interlocutor, we address the following questions: How might new materialist theories (e.g. Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, or Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter) help us assess the literary landscapes created by these weird literary objects? To what extent do such theories succeed or fail at creating a new interpretive framework or reading practice for literary work in general? Finally, how might the new materialist turn toward the "inhuman" provide ethical and conceptual challenges for literary criticism?

While new materialist theories have for a long time been deployed in fields like sociology, it is only in the last decade that they have become increasingly important for theorizing visual art. New materialist forays into the literary have been even more restrictive, with actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology being the most prominent. However, even though their ideas may have broad applicability to literary works, new materialist theorists are often ill-equipped or ill-disposed to assess the most recent developments in the world of experimental writing. When, for example, object-oriented critics have tried to apply their ideas to literature, the unfortunate tendency has been to go back to conservative notions of the "well-wrought" poem of New Critical analysis (see, for instance, the speculative literary criticism of Harman, Timothy Morton, and Grant Hamilton). Similarly, Rita Felski’s deployment of Latour’s actor-network theory is typically applied to fairly mainstream literary practices, such as readerly attachment to the realist novel. Given the various “weird” forms that the literary can now take (literature in the expanded field; digital-, media-, or performance-enhanced works; the parawriting of the web), new materialist theories may be productively extended and challenged by literary experimentation, and yet this contact has barely been explored. The three presentations in this panel seek to open this line of inquiry, in the belief that such an exploration can offer a fresh application of new materialist theories while also articulating the capacities and limitations of this theory as a resource for literary criticism.

In "New Gothic Writing and the Speculative Onto-story," Joe Milutis proposes an expanded definition of the gothic as a space of weird materiality. According to Jane Bennett, the object of new materialism is to create a richer “image of matter.” She calls her technique, inspired by witnessing the strange meeting of "a dead rat, a plastic cap, a spool of thread," the "speculative onto-story." While her object-oriented methodology is based off Adorno's negative dialectics, it also reflects new stylistic dispensations towards the object that can be found in new gothic-identified contemporary poetry, which Milutis analyzes through the work of Aase Berg, Laura Glenum, Jonathan Schwartz, Nada Gordon, and Christian Hawkey. Bennett's philosophical discourse thus shares a family resemblance with contemporary gothic materiality that neither party seems to fully cognize.

Turning from the gothic to the virtual, Paul Jaussen’s “Toward a Virtual Politics of Literature” begins with a recent technological rendering of modernism’s weirdest protagonist. In 2018, the Goethe Institute of Prague hosted a Virtual Reality adaptation of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which was promoted as an opportunity for the viewer to become “Gregor Samsa” and thus have “first-hand experience of what it is like to be transformed into an insect.” Jaussen argues that the naive rhetorical framing of this transmediation offers an opening for literary criticism to theorize anew the virtual properties of literary objects. The literary virtual does not come from donning a VR headset, but in the very nature of readerly negotiation and production of potentiality that is embedded within the act of reading. To make this claim, Jaussen traces a philosophical genealogy of the virtual by way of Deleuze, Arendt, and Rancière in order to argue that the play between the virtual and actual at the heart of the weird literary objects generates a politics not of identification (“becoming Gregor Samsa”) but of possibility.

Avery Slater’s presentation, “Digital Memory Technologies: Postmaterialist Inscription?” concludes the panel by extending materialism into immaterialism. Digital memory and computational inscription technologies, even as they have pushed the boundaries of materialist analysis in the literary humanities in new directions, also continue to pose significant challenges to our pre-existing methods and concepts. It is in fact not only the materiality but also the immateriality of the digital archive that requires further theorization from a new materialist standpoint, a position which extends Harman’s claim that, in fact, object-oriented ontology is an “immaterialism.” From this perspective, Slater argues, the archive in the digital age may be a “weirder” object than we have yet appreciated. Between the material and the informational, digital mnemotechnics of inscription open a space for re-theorizing the future of our literary objects. The “weirdness” that saturates the (literary) object of memory resides equally at the mathematical and the hardware-levels. Such digital conceptual artworks like Jonathan Basile’s complete and searchable iteration of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel” (2009) hint at the uncanny nature of the archive’s “digital sublime.” Taking a materials-science perspective, Slater explores the status of the archive within a twenty-first-century literary imaginary that is deeply informed by computation.

The array of weird literary objects presented through these papers deserve close analysis in their own right. However, by placing them in dialogue with recent theoretical interventions, these objects become a useful opportunity for testing the merit of new materialist thought for literary criticism as such. Ultimately, we believe that weird objects ultimately raise a question that all critics must answer: what kind of matter is the literary object, after all? This question we hope to address in an open discussion during the final fifteen minutes of the panel, following the three formal presentations.