This panel seeks to complicate our ways of perceiving “indifference”: a vexed affect, a cognitive strategy of withdrawing attention, a neurodiverse situation that beckons critical reconsideration, and an aesthetic perspective that takes pleasure in refusing to discriminate. Focusing on indifference within or about literature, this panel investigates how it operates in literary production and reception, assumes narrative representations, and evokes socio-political agency. To foreground the transhistorical, theoretical, and inter-disciplinary value of indifference, we have assembled a wide range of textual sources from nineteenth-century British sensation fiction, post-war American fiction, to contemporary literature-teaching pedagogy designed for neurodiverse students.

We aim to build constructive dialogues with the existing scholarship on indifference. Jonathan Loesberg’s A Return to Aesthetics (2005) situates indifference within Kantian concepts of aesthetic apprehension and embodiment to make the case that aesthetics can offer ways of apprehending and interpreting things in the world. Erik Gray’s The Poetry of Indifference (2005) sketches out a romantic poetics that not only represents indifference but also incorporates it with poetic forms. Madhavi Menon’s Indifference to Difference (2015) proposes a supposedly liberating concept “indifferent universalism” to critique the oppressive elements from identity politics. Sharing these contributions’ enthusiasm in complicating indifference, this panel will be more focused on how indifference can be traced, applied, used, and distributed within literature, particularly within narrative fictions and literature-teaching methods.

Liwen Zhang’s presentation will discuss detective fiction’s possible indifference to plot-unmotivating passages, using Mary Elizabeth Braddon as a key author in this discussion. In doing so, it explores what constitutes a novel’s essential versus unessential content in the light of its genre-specific requirements. It uses Mary Elizabeth Braddon as its primary case study, because she, as one of the pioneering British writers of sensation fiction, constantly pokes at detective fiction’s genre boundaries. A detective novel is thematically and structurally more complicated than a detection report, as the former inevitably contains content that is unhelpful to the solving of the central mystery. Such uninformative content may include quotidian rituals, character quirks, landscape descriptions, and philosophical musings that obviously or eventually do not serve as clues. Zhang asks whether we should view these details only as atmospheric or ornamental elements that add literary flair to the crime detection plot. A further inquiry concerning these genre-neutral elements is to determine their appropriate ratio compared to genre-specific components. Zhang suggests that an alternative novelistic practice exists beyond the dichotomy of genre rigidity and genre fluidity: explorative probing of genre boundaries, either diagetically or extra-diagetically.

Connor Bennett’s paper asks to what extent indifference is a viable method of survival. Engaging with recent work (Tina Post; Sunny Xiang; Xine Yao) that helped theorize how a minimal performance of affect—a state of protective indifference—might function counterhegemonic practice for marginalized people within misogynist and white supremacist states, Bennett argues that such performances feature throughout Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays as models for reparative reading practices. That the novel begins with an overt display of indifference by its protagonist, Maria, is no coincidence: Didion engages with questions surrounding the political potentials of indifference, not only for how we might navigate hostile worlds, but for how we might navigate hostile texts. Bennett suggests that Maria’s totalizing descent into indifference, her fall into an affectless asymbolia, asks us to interrogate both the viability of such reading practices as well as the tolls that they may take upon those subjected to violence on and off the page.

The last presentation from Mary-Beth Brophy will expand our vision of indifference by considering how to use literature to engage neurodiverse students in classroom. Many neurodiverse college students – particularly those who are also members of other marginalized or under-represented groups – have developed strategies to camouflage their neurodiversity with indifference, and their presence in classrooms may not be obvious. These students may be reluctant to participate in class discussions if the only neurodiverse examples they are exposed to in course materials reflect behaviors they have spent a lifetime attempting to conceal. Brophy’s presentation will use the television character Will Trent and Charlotte Lucas from Pride and Prejudice to illuminate two methods engaging camouflaged neurodiverse students in literature and creative writing courses, as well as recommend strategies to help these students ease into class discussions in a way that reduces their perceived risk of exposure.