New Deadline: Literature and Affect (3/14/2014; 7/2-4/2014)

Australasian Association of Literature
The University of Melbourne

July 2-4, 2014

Deadline: March 14, 2014

Confirmed keynote speakers: Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania), Sharon Marcus (Columbia University), & Gillian Russell (Australian National University)

What is “the affective turn” and where did it come from?  The relationship between literature and affect has long been a fraught one. On the one hand, the discipline of literary criticism derives from early eighteenth- century aesthetic philosophy that can be understood as an attempt to theorize pleasure. On the other, after Kant, criticism is predicated upon the separation of feeling from judgment. Enshrining this separation as a principle of critical practice, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley formulated “The Affective Fallacy” (1949) to name the shame of an emotional entanglement with the literary text. Here, the aesthetic functions as a conceptual mechanism for separating pleasure and value. And if pleasure is such a contested topic, what about pain, what about the ugly feelings? (to use Sianne Ngai’s coinage). And where is the body in all of this?

More recently, the so-called “affective turn” has turned a new attention upon the world of feeling. It returns literary criticism to New Criticism’s scandalous scene of the affective fallacy in order to re-evaluate the languages of feeling. A shaping force in illuminating the value of the affective has been queer theory, in its vital exploration of the transformative potential both of forward-looking utopian desires and backwards feelings such as shame. The affective turn has also been powered by the recognition that emotion and history are not opposed, and that emotion itself has a history. (Indeed, in a dramatic statement of the inseparability of history and affect, the Marxist cultural historian, Fredric Jameson, asserts that “History is what hurts”.) Perhaps paradoxically, new intensities of interest in literary form (e.g. as objectified and “unfelt” emotion) and in the cognitive dimensions of feeling also energize this turn and challenge the distinction between reason and feeling.

The committee invites papers that engage with any aspect of literature and affect; explore the significance for literature of the affective turn that has informed the humanities more broadly; analyze the relationship between affect and the literary aesthetic; engage affect and emotion to explore (or indeed contest) the singularity of literature. The committee also invites papers that consider literature and affect historically, and that consider affect, literature and the problem of evaluation (aka judgment).

Possible topics might include:

• Literary hedonisms and literary pleasure Practices of reading New formalisms Cultures of taste
• Memory and affective histories Affect and temporality Literature and public emotions Theories of affect and emotion Fandom, celebrity, scandal, Cognitive literary criticism, psychoanalysis and the neurosciences Pain and trauma
• Sensation and corporeality Sexuality and eroticism Literary and aesthetic judgment Aesthetic-affective moods, modes and tones (e.g. sentiment, melodrama, camp)
• Non-human, impersonal and animal affect Actors and performance Emotions and new media (e.g. memes, avatars, social networking)

Please submit a title and 500-word abstract for proposed papers by Friday February 28, 2014 via the submission form on the AAL conference website.

Conference organizers: Clara Tuite, Sarah Balkin, Sarah Comyn, Corey Wakeling (English and Theatre Studies, The University of Melbourne)

CFP: AAL Conference 2014 “Literature and Affect” (2/28/2014; 7/2-4/2014)

Australasian Association of Literature

The University of Melbourne

July 2-4, 2014

Deadline: February 28, 2014

Confirmed keynote speakers: Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania), Sharon Marcus (Columbia University), & Gillian Russell (Australian National University)

What is “the affective turn” and where did it come from?  The relationship between literature and affect has long been a fraught one. On the one hand, the discipline of literary criticism derives from early eighteenth- century aesthetic philosophy that can be understood as an attempt to theorize pleasure. On the other, after Kant, criticism is predicated upon the separation of feeling from judgment. Enshrining this separation as a principle of critical practice, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley formulated “The Affective Fallacy” (1949) to name the shame of an emotional entanglement with the literary text. Here, the aesthetic functions as a conceptual mechanism for separating pleasure and value. And if pleasure is such a contested topic, what about pain, what about the ugly feelings? (to use Sianne Ngai’s coinage). And where is the body in all of this?

More recently, the so-called “affective turn” has turned a new attention upon the world of feeling. It returns literary criticism to New Criticism’s scandalous scene of the affective fallacy in order to re-evaluate the languages of feeling. A shaping force in illuminating the value of the affective has been queer theory, in its vital exploration of the transformative potential both of forward-looking utopian desires and backwards feelings such as shame. The affective turn has also been powered by the recognition that emotion and history are not opposed, and that emotion itself has a history. (Indeed, in a dramatic statement of the inseparability of history and affect, the Marxist cultural historian, Fredric Jameson, asserts that “History is what hurts”.) Perhaps paradoxically, new intensities of interest in literary form (e.g. as objectified and “unfelt” emotion) and in the cognitive dimensions of feeling also energize this turn and challenge the distinction between reason and feeling.

The committee invites papers that engage with any aspect of literature and affect; explore the significance for literature of the affective turn that has informed the humanities more broadly; analyze the relationship between affect and the literary aesthetic; engage affect and emotion to explore (or indeed contest) the singularity of literature. The committee also invites papers that consider literature and affect historically, and that consider affect, literature and the problem of evaluation (aka judgment).

Possible topics might include:

• Literary hedonisms and literary pleasure Practices of reading New formalisms Cultures of taste
• Memory and affective histories Affect and temporality Literature and public emotions Theories of affect and emotion Fandom, celebrity, scandal, Cognitive literary criticism, psychoanalysis and the neurosciences Pain and trauma
• Sensation and corporeality Sexuality and eroticism Literary and aesthetic judgment Aesthetic-affective moods, modes and tones (e.g. sentiment, melodrama, camp)
• Non-human, impersonal and animal affect Actors and performance Emotions and new media (e.g. memes, avatars, social networking)

Please submit a title and 500-word abstract for proposed papers by Friday February 28, 2014 via the submission form on the AAL conference website.

Conference organizers: Clara Tuite, Sarah Balkin, Sarah Comyn, Corey Wakeling (English and Theatre Studies, The University of Melbourne)

Last Call: AAL Conference 2013 "Modern Soundscapes" (3/1/2013; 7/10-13/2013)

Modern Soundscapes

Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Literature held in conjunction with the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia

University of New South Wales

July 10-13, 2013

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Steven Connor (Cambridge) and Garrett Stewart (Iowa)

Conference website - http://www.aal.asn.au/conference/2013/

What is a modern soundscape?

This conference aims to address this question by drawing together researchers engaged with the history and theory of sound and noise from the fields of literature, film, and media studies, as well as architecture, music and the visual arts to consider the multiple soundscapes that have shaped and continue to shape the history of modernity. Jonathan Sterne contends that dating from around 1725 ‘sound itself’ becomes ‘an object and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music’. This historical claim challenges the assumption that modern culture is essentially a visual culture, substituting the ear for the eye, and creating a space for a new sonic history of modernity to be written, theorized and contested.   Thinking through sound has long been a literary preoccupation. Reflecting on the potential of the “auditory imagination” T.S.Eliot wrote, it “is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and civilized entality.”  Thinking through the resonant opening created by poetic form Eliot imagines potential creative fusions that cut across space, time, culture and forms. Taking inspiration from Eliot’s expansive vision, we invite papers that engage with sound as a catalyst for thought, critical and creative practice, and historical reconsiderations of modern soundscapes from the eighteenth century to the present.

Possible themes/issues may include:

• Voices, Listening, Hearing
• Sound Technologies
• Music and Modern Space
• Literary soundscapes
• Sound & Cultural/National Difference
• Sonic Environments
• Noise/Sound & Everyday Life
• Noise & Silence
• The politics of noise (rioting, dissent, suppression)
• Noise & the Media
• Print Culture/ the History of the Book
• Architectural Space & Acoustics
• Psychology & Noise
• Aesthetics & Noise
• Film Sound
• Noise & the Avant-Garde
• Noise & Modernism
• Victorian & Eighteenth Century Soundscapes

Please submit titles and abstracts for proposed papers by Friday March 1st, 2013 via the submission form on the conference website.

Conference organisers

Helen Groth, Julian Murphet, Penny Hone, Joseph Cummins