Lyric Excess: Capital, Nature, Life (NeMLA 2024, Boston)
What is the potential, liberatory or otherwise, of excess as a figure, motif, scene, or problem? Blake’s “road of excess” offers a counterpoint to an industrial-capitalistic ethos of productivity, frugality, and reason. Moreover, Bataille speaks of “excess” as a form of unproductive expenditure of energy under modernity. If “animatedness” (Ngai) operates as a racialized iteration of exaggerated affect, how does one read the overdetermined sentimentality of the lyric “I”? Lyric excess, then, invites an engagement with scenes of excess, or in other words exuberance, surplus, or waste, to rethink lyric poetry’s non-utilitarian possibilities in form and content.