Parentheses, Hospitality, and Other Obvious Things

This is a talk about parentheses, and the ways they rely on a supposedly obvious premise: things inside parentheses are purportedly less important than the content outside the parentheses. And yet, parentheticals change the sentences in which they appear, and their contents, while theoretically being less significant than their contexts, are nonetheless too important to discard. Parentheses create spaces for words and phrases that seem alien and vulnerable in their contexts, and thus demonstrate a kind of hospitality, welcoming into sentences elements that seem unrelated but are themselves crucial to the stories in which they appear.

In this talk, I look at works of Renaissance literature (when parentheses first started widely appearing in text) to explore how parentheses perform this kind of welcoming into a sentence's household. Remembering that the Greek word for household is oikos, the root of the word “ecology,” I propose that parentheses help us see the fundamentally ecological nature of literature. Parentheses highlight how even the most disparate and seemingly least relevant things are intimately connected, and how literature can creates spaces of welcome and refuge for hosting, at least for a brief while, those most vulnerable to evanescence

About the Speaker

Chris Barrett is Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University, Dean's Fellow in the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, and Director of the HSS Humanities Center. She joined the LSU faculty in 2012 after completing her doctoral degree in English at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests include early modern English literature, poetry and poetics, ecocriticisms, and geocritical approaches to literature. Her published works--recognized by Rainmaker Awards in 2018 and 2025--include the book Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety (Oxford University Press, 2018), as well as articles and essays on forests, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, butterflies, whales, fire, ether, compasses, birdsong, knock-knock jokes, and more. Her research has been supported by the Council on Research, the Newberry Library, the Folger Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Collection, the Lilly Library, and the Friends of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. From 2013-2024, Dr. Barrett was the faculty adviser to Spectrum, LSU's largest LGBTQIA+ student organization. Additionally, Barrett has been the recipient of several teaching awards, including the inaugural Outstanding Professor Award from the LSU Student Government (2018), the Tiger Athletic Foundation President’s Award (2017), the Tiger Athletic Foundation Undergraduate Teaching Award (2014), and the English Graduate Student Association Graduate Faculty Award (2014). This talk is drawn from her second monograph, on the poetics of the obvious.

LSU Science Café is presented in partnership with Campus Federal Credit Union and WRKF.

Registration & Attendance Information

The event is open to the public, and advance registration through Eventbrite is recommended.

LSU Science Café is in-person only (i.e., no live feed) but will be recorded and posted on our YouTube channel.

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Doors open at 5 PM. Event begins at 6 PM.

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