theory

In his contribution to an anthology of keywords for American cultural studies, Bruce Robbins registers an ambivalence at the heart of the term “public.” This ambivalence, Robbins writes, stems from the fact that the term’s “claim to represent the social whole has continued to bump up against evidence that large classes of people have been omitted from it.” Indeed, “public,” as a terminological category, requires universality. But in our contemporary historical situation – due to enduring social antagonisms, increasingly uneven distributions of resources and power, and ever-lengthening histories of exclusion and oppression – the fault lines of this never-universal are showing with renewed clarity, even as globalization continues to demand thinking

Southeastern Theatre Conference

History/Theory/Criticism/Literature Committee

Call for Papers for 2018 Young Scholars Award

About the Award:

We are pleased to announce the launch of Medical and Health Humanities (www.medicalhealthhumanities.com), an online publication designed to bring together humanities scholars and students from across institutions and disciplines. Our intention is to build “a department without walls.” The site is founded and edited by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a medical doctor.

a/b: Auto/Biography StudiesCall for Papers: Special Issue on Trans Narratives

Deadline: 15 January 2018

“Trans” has taken on a number of important theoretical and critical meanings inside and outside the academy. A prefix with the sense in the OED of ‘across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, from one place, person, thing, or state to another,’ “trans” can attach itself to other words to connote movement and change, and in this sense it affects what we think we know about media or nation, working to destablize settled knowledge about the world we live in. When it is attached to identity, it has destablized ideas about gender and sexuality.

“To write, and to read, is to be exposed, to expose oneself […] to ‘exscription’.” – The Birth to Presence

“We have to begin by getting through, and by means of, the exscription of our body: its being inscribed-outside, its being placed outside the text as the most proper movement of its text; the text itself being abandoned, left at its limit.” – Corpus