“Psy-” Elsewhere

ACLA Seminar, 2016

Harvard: March 17-20

Organizer: Cate I. Reilly, Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University

I am putting together a seminar entitled, “ ‘Psy-’ Elsewhere” for the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting. A description of the seminar can be found below, as well as on the ACLA website at http://www.acla.org/seminar/%E2%80%9Cpsy-%E2%80%9D-elsewhere

If interested, please send a 350-word abstracts to cireilly@princeton.edu no later than September 23.
I look forward to hearing back from you.

Cate I. Reilly

Seminar Description:

Since Freudian psychoanalysis first posited a topographical model of the mind, the notion of an elsewhere in the “psy disciplines” (psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology) has often been associated with either the realm of the unconscious or the totemic objects connected to the archeological structure of psychic processes. From Freud’s collection of Persian rugs and Far Eastern, Greek, Egyptian and Mexican artifacts to Jung’s commentaries on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the I Ching, the “psy disciplines” have long turned to non- Western sources as both interpretive points of reference and a reservoir of purported wisdom. Yet as these disciplines expanded transnationally, driven by professionalization, the need to standardize treatment practices, and reach new patient populations, they grew increasingly attentive to geo-political elsewhere(s). As Derrida points out in his assessment of “geopsychoanalysis,” the transposition to non-European locations was as much shaped by actual geography as by an institutional imagination of what did (and did not) constitute global reach.

This seminar asks: What is the nature of the “elsewhere” both created by these disciplines but also seen in excess of them? How does it reflect back on these disciplines’ own definition? How is this elsewhere generated, sustained and responded to? When and how is affirmed or resisted? By whom or by what?

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the “psy disciplines” in contexts beyond Western Europe and the continental U.S., by both looking to narrative works that thematize these intersections and by bringing literary tools to bear on clinical scenarios. The seminar invites papers dealing with authors and theorists whose work reflects on the ambiguous, fraught and politically resonant configurations that resulted as European “psy disciplines” negotiated new local sites of practice and vice versa. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: colonial psychiatry and racism (e.g. Memmi, Mannoni, Fanon, Girindrasekar Bose, Ashis Nandy) problems of translation and the clinic (Lacan and beyond); abuses carried out under the Soviet system; contemporary psy-ops military strategies; psychoanalysis in/and Latin America; the growth of country specific manuals of psychiatric disorders; debates surrounding biopolitics (Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Mbembe, Esposito); global affect management and the relevance of these disciplines for politics (as in Said’s Freud and the Non-European).

Presumed Autonomy:

Literature and Art in Theory and Practice

10–13 May 2016

Department of English, Stockholm University, Sweden

Ever since the emergence of the modern marketplace for cultural goods, literary texts and art works have, on occasion, defied the expectations of its readers and audience, affronted their moral ethos, or flaunted a disregard for their sensibilities and norms. The potential power of art to disrupt the perceptions of its audience was foregrounded in the critical discourse of the modernists and the historical avant-garde and this possibility continues to animate critical debates, particularly those organized around some understanding of autonomy. With the all but complete commodification of every artistic and literary practice, it is more urgent than ever to pose the question whether we can still presume autonomy.

The four-day conference seeks to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines to assess, from the perspective of the present, the historical trajectory of autonomy as it has been conceptualized, recognized, assumed, deployed, and questioned by critics and practitioners of art, and to explore artistic, philosophical, cultural, and institutional negotiations of art as embedded in and entangled with the multiple heteronomies of market, state, religion, education… (a list that cannot be complete). As there are important intersections between various definitions of autonomy as well as artistic practices, several methodological and thematic strands will be brought together in four streams:

–Autonomy and the Avant-garde

–Theories of aesthetic autonomy

–Fields, markets, capitals, commodities and autonomy

–Autonomy and the body

The conference organizers invite contributions that address the issues indicated in the rubrics above. You can choose either to earmark your abstract for one of the streams, or send it in for general consideration. The list below can be taken to indicate the scope of those particular and general concerns, while not necessarily restricting the possibilities. Proposals for presentations should address the problematics of autonomy in relation to one or several of the following thematic headings:

• aesthetic codings of the modern: myths, styles, temporalities, and techniques
• affect
• the architecture of thought
• biopower and control
• capitalism
• the commodity
• contemporary critical efforts to re-theorize form
• the debate between activist and normative formalisms
• early twentieth-century theorizations of literature and modern art
• ecologies
• fields of cultural production
• education, the university: formation, reproduction and defense of autonomy
• forms of capital
• global modernisms
• the historical avant-garde
• inaesthetics
• institutions
• living materialities
• national, transnational, and postnational frameworks
• object-oriented vs. becoming-oriented paradigms
• politics
• the (post)human body
• spaces, territories, place
• the state as the source of autonomy or heteronomy
• “world literature,” the postcolonial condition, and economic globalization

For more information about the conference, please visit our website: presumedautonomy.se

Confirmed Keynotes: Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London), Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Nicholas Brown (University of Illinois, Chicago), Anne A. Cheng (Princeton University), Peter Kalliney (University of Kentucky), Gisèle Sapiro (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS, Paris), and Lisa Siraganian (Southern Methodist University).

Please submit your paper abstract (about 500 words) and a brief biographical note either by email to autonomy@english.su.se, or by using the ‘Proposal Submission’ tab on the conference’s website page “Call for Papers” for online submission.

Conference organizers:

Gül Bilge Han

Bo G. Ekelund

Marina Ludwigs

Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson

Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva

You & Me & Ut Pictura Poesis Make Three: Illustrated Poetry after 1900 (NeMLA 2016, Hartford)

This panel invites examination of illustrated poetry, published after 1900, containing text by one person and images by another. Papers may treat broadsides, poetry chapbooks, children’s picture books, anthologies, and other illustrated poetic productions. Subjects for investigation can include contemporaneous collaborations; new illustrations of extant poems; or a retroactive application of older art to newer poetry. The focus of the session will be the collisions and collusions that occur between poem and illustration, including how the pictorial elements interpret, critique, subvert, amplify, or otherwise engage the text.

https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15981

XVIIth Biennial International Ernest Hemingway Conference
Oak Park, Illinois /  Dominican University
July 17-22,2016 

AT HOME IN HEMINGWAY’S WORLD

 The Hemingway family’s homes in Oak Park accommodated a large, complex, intellectually curious, temperamentally diverse, ambitious, bold, and sometimes fragile family living in a rapidly changing village belonging to a deeply uncertain world. Their historical and cultural significance emerge not just from the fact that Ernest Hemingway spent his boyhood here, but also from relationships which were defined and negotiated within and beyond the walls of these homes, among the family members, between that family and the world, and between past and present.

Both insular and cosmopolitan, Oak Park nurtured Ernest’s confidence, taught him the value of domesticity, and inspired his wanderlust. He left home after high school, returning after his wounding in Italy. At home but not at home, Hemingway wrote and drank in his third floor bedroom, walked around the village with his cane, and read about the war on the front porch. By the summer of 1919 his parents had kicked him out. Hemingway, of course, went on to become among the most famous American citizens of the world, making homes or spending extended periods in North America, Europe, Africa, even China—a veritable prototype for citizens of the global twenty-first century. After his father’s funeral in 1928, Hemingway never returned to Oak Park. He was at home everywhere and nowhere in the world until that July 1961 day he left it for good.

If we become global citizens, crossing borders peacefully or through war, how do we remain wholly connected to family, friends, neighbors, to our sense of ourselves? How do places—geographical, imaginative, spiritual—become simultaneously “mysterious and homelike”? Where are we truly at home? And how do we attend to home’s mysteries? What does it mean for readers to be at home with Hemingway and his world? Furthermore, how can Hemingway help us better understand what it means to be at home in the world in 2016?

Presentations and panels on all aspects of Hemingway Studies are welcome. The above description and following list are suggestive rather than definitive, though they do represent the broad scope of the post-conference essay collection:

• Maternal and Paternal Legacies—Husbands and Wives—Sibling Tales I: Fictions—Sibling Tales II: Memoirs, Recollections, Correspondence—Incest in Hemingway—Grace’s Paintings, Clarence’s Photographs, and Ernest’s Visual Imagination—Origins and Inheritances, Literary and Otherwise—Births and Birthings
• Domestic Spaces—Home after War—Homes away from Home—Nostalgia—Models of Itinerancy—Road Trips, Train Rides, and Pilgrimages—From Congregationalist to Catholic—Growing up with Modernity
• The Childhood Scrapbooks—Hemingway and the Invention of Adolescence—”The Woppian Way” and Other Juvenalia—Being Children, Having Children—Football and other Sports—Fishing and Leisure—Boyhood and the Man
• Hemingway and the Chicago Renaissance—Midwestern Selves and Literatures—Oak Park Values and Influences—Oak Park Men: Ernest Miller Hemingway, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Frank Lloyd Wright—Chicago: Next Door Neighbor
• Researching the Life: Local Resources, Tricks of the Trade, Tales from the Archives—Hemingway in the Classroom I: Teacher Perspectives—Hemingway in the Classroom II: Student Perspectives—Reading America in Hemingway: International Perspectives—Don’t Forget the Poetry & Play—Veterans’ Tales

One-page abstracts and 40-word professional bio to Alex Vernon by email (vernon@hendrix.edu(link sends e-mail)) or post (Department of English, Hendrix College, 1600 Washington Avenue, Conway, Arkansas 72032 USA), by 1 October 2015http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/oak-park-2016-0