LSU Science Café: Parentheses, Hospitality, and Other Obvious Things

Think parentheses don’t matter? They quietly reshape meaning, turning sentences into spaces of connection and unexpected significance. 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 them. And yet, parentheticals change the sentences in which they appear, and their contents, while theoretically being less significant than their contexts. 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, Associate Professor Chris Barrett looks at works of Renaissance literature (when parentheses first started appearing widely in text) to explore how parentheses perform a kind of welcoming into a sentence’s household. Remembering that the Greek word for household is oikos, the root of the word “ecology,” Barrett proposes 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 create spaces of welcome and refuge for hosting, at least for a brief while, those most vulnerable to evanescence. About the Speaker Chris Barrett is an associate professor of English at LSU, a Dean’s Fellow in the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, and director of its 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. In 2013-2024, 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.