“Attachment and Affect" Graduate Student Conference at UVA

Attachment and Affect
March 22-23, 2019
The University of Virginia Department of English Graduate Conference

Keynote by Lisa Ruddick (UChicago)
Master class with Rita Felski (UVA/SDU)

Why does the study of literature matter? What is the relationship between reader and text? How can affective responses to texts inform criticism? This conference seeks to take seriously our aesthetic and affective attachments, the attachments at work within and among literary texts, and the ways attachments form and function.

The University of Virginia Department of English invites graduate student proposals for conference presentations that explore issues of attunement, mood, feeling, pleasure, taste, identification, inwardness, the self, intersubjectivity, judgment, politics, aesthetics, consumer culture, objects, the everyday and ordinary, and the state of academic criticism. We welcome papers that explore these topics as well as their interdisciplinary intersections in fields such as philosophy, religious studies, history, art history, music, architecture, and others.

Possible paper topics may include but are not limited to:
  • Defining attachment
  • Rethinking pleasure
  • Mood and atmosphere
  • Positive and negative affect
  • The phenomenology of reading
  • The sensibility of criticism
  • How texts orient their readers
  • Aesthetic value
  • A hermeneutic language of receptivity and generosity
  • A text’s interpersonal and transpersonal dimensions
  • The relationship between forms in literature and forms in the world
  • Everyday forms and structures of experience
  • Book history/how texts resonate across time
  • The relationship between art and the social
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words, along with relevant biographical information and institutional affiliation, to uvagradcon2019@gmail.com by January 2, 2019​. Presentations should be 20 minutes in length.

Lisa Ruddick is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, and Gnosis (1990) and many articles, including “When Nothing is Cool” (2015), which examines the state of literary criticism. Her current book project explores the ways in which professional training in the humanities, conducted with the best of intentions, can thwart feelings of aliveness by partially dissociating practitioners from their intuitions and deep affective resources.

Rita Felski is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of English at the University of Virginia and the Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark. She is the author of many books, most recently The Limits of Critique (2015) and Critique and Postcritique (2017). Her current research centers on questions of method, interpretation, and aesthetic value, and she is completing a new book called Hooked: Art and Attachment, examining how and why we get stuck to works of art.

As always, remember that if you decide to submit proposals to any conferences, be sure to consider applying for funding. See the Graduate Studies Office’s webpage on Conference Travel Funding. Remember also that you have to apply for the funding before you attend the conference, and that you don’t have to wait for your paper or abstract to be accepted before you apply. (In recent years, the funding has tended to run out early in the spring semester.)

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