cfp.english.upenn.edu

“But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when [we] exist is nothing” –from de Beauvoir’s _The Ethics of Ambiguity_

Seeking essay proposals for a book on The Erotics of ‘Post’: Reparation, Practice, Theory. At the recent MLA 2012 conference (Seattle), I sought essays engaged with poetics, subjectivities, especially feminisms, and the eroticism of post—its implicit delays, lingering temporal modalities, and totalizing narratives—for my panel “Re-Fashioning the Poetics of ‘Post’; Or, How to Imagine Beyond Postmodernism.” Successful proposals will grapple with the current interdisciplinary manifestations of “post” while positing a working practice or approach for contemporary theory in the present.

Concept:
The objective of this book is to imagine the re-fashioning of ‘post’ within postmodern theory and poetry with explicit emphasis on feminism. The rhetoric and culture of ‘post’ and in particular, postmodern theory and practice has primarily been “a white male phenomena and […] feminism has stayed away from the debates as if they were not pertinent to feminist concerns” (Linda Hutcheon 65). This prospective collection seeks to discuss the possibilities that might occur in theory and poetry if we begin to envision feminist poetic practice and space beyond or without post or post-post renderings. But we must first engage the relationship between the shifts of post and the intersection of cultural studies with feminist poetics. Of late, postmodernism has evolved into post-postmodernism, feminisms into postfeminism, and the human into the post-post human raising ethical, theoretical, and ecological questions about how and what we are becoming now. The essays in this collection will question the articulations and shapes these ‘new’ formations take up when already situated within the post of modernism. What is a ‘post’ subjectivity? How do we desire and communicate if, as some writers and academics claim, we inhabit a period wherein art, history, poetry, language, theory, and subjectivity has ended? The work in this collection takes up Derrida’s question in the _Spectres of Marx_, “I would like to learn to live" (xvii) and so, how do we learn to live now?
Contact: caderkso [at] ucalgary [dot] ca