èצӰÏñ

Speaker(s): Keynote Speaker: Nancy Ruttenburg, William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature in the English Department

It has become a commonplace to speak of literature as a site of relation, between author and reader, reader and text, text and context, context and history. And yet, as we look back at the past decades’ post-structuralist, new critical, new historicist, and reader-response approaches to this site of relation, we are called to ask anew: what are the terms of this relation? Where do we stand, now, on the question of agency in literary experience? At this historical moment, the question of agency is fraught with doubt yet inextricably bound up with the problems that define the terrain of contemporary thought: the looming uncertainty of environmental responsibility, the state/fate of humanism and the humanities, literature’s place in ethical thought, and the tenuous foothold of any ethics within a post-secular, post-humanist, post- morality intellectual context. This conference seeks to provide an occasion for investigation into the place of agency at the site of literary relation, in the event of literary experience.

Panels: 

Lethargy, Exhaustion, Sleep