Sixteenth and seventeenth-century works, from Utopia to Paradise Lost, construct fictional worlds through the appeals to the epistemic and ontological status of the future. In the Defence of Poesy, Philip Sidney elucidates how futures govern both poetic production and dissemination. The poet is a "vates" who can prophesize the future, or the "maker" who creates imitable models for the reader. The act of imitation is transferred to the reader of poetry, whose "well-doing" in the real world uniquely fulfills the poet's work.

Playful Interruptions in Recent Film

In Jean-Luc Nancy's The Inoperative Community representations are not just works of art (oeuvre); they also, in fact, work. Representations present "community" and thereby give a disparate group of beings an identity, borders, and a body. If representations work, what happens when a work founders, when it falls apart, and opens onto something else? Would this opening then be the place or space of play, even serious play? What does this "absence of work" look like formally? What are the ethical consequences of such playful interruptions? Papers on non-mainstream directors are of particular interest.

This special session at the 2011 M/MLA conference invites papers that explore the multitude of functions, forms, enactments, and critiques of festivity and the festive spirit in 20th - and 21st-century world literature, the arts, mass media and new media.