Making Sense Workshop 1: Immediacy

The first workshop of the year focusses on the concept of ‘Immediacy’. The Oxford Languages Dictionary defines ‘immediacy’ as ‘the quality of bringing one into direct and instant involvement with something, giving rise to a sense of urgency or excitement’. In cultural studies, scholars have reflected on the stakes of privileging the ‘immediate’ over the ‘mediated’. Work in affect studies and the history of emotions has done much to explore the social and political dynamics of such experiences – often coextensive with feelings of immersion, absorption or mystical oneness.

In exploring this term, we will take as a starting point Anna Kornbluh’s recent polemical discussion of contemporary cultural production, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024). Kornbluh lambasts twenty-first century literature, film and visual arts for its preoccupation with the ‘urgency’ and ‘excitement’ of bodily presence, emotional transparency, and first-person disclosure. Her study raises provocative questions for scholars – including many in medical humanities – whose objects of study grapple with the ‘evidence’ of embodied experience.

If you have time, please read ‘Writing’, pp. 65–112 of Immediacy (on autofiction, memoir, realism, therapeutic writing and ‘first-personalism’). The ‘Conclusion’, pp. 191–217 is also recommended. The readings are available online via Durham University Library (or from Fraser Riddell, f.i.riddell@dur.ac.uk).

The event is hosted by the Affective Experience Lab, led by Corinne Saunders and Fraser Riddell.