theory

Call for Panelists -  2017 Narrative Conference

March 23-26, 2017, Lexington, KY

The University of Kentucky will host the Narrative Conference in Lexington, KY from March 23-26, 2017. Keynote speakers include Judith Butler, Kenneth Warren, and Linda Williams.

We seek two panelists to join a panel entitled “Narratives of Queer Resistance.” 

The Legacies of Romanticism in the Tides of Modernity

American Comparative Literature Association Conference

Utrecht, Netherlands, July 6-9, 2017.

Psychoanalysis and Its Objects

In Plato’s Phadrus, Socrates relates a myth of the invention of writing, presented to King Thamus by Theuth. While Theuth claims to have invented the means for increased wisdom and memory, Thamus disagrees: “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves.” Writing involves an exteriorization of the faculties of both language and, significantly, memory.

Contemporary poets like J. H. Prynne, Denise Riley, and John Wilkinson have explored the nature and scope of an alternative mode of ‘thinking’ in poetry. Aided by late modernist reformulations of poetic difficulty, these poets continue the Romantic legacy by reconfiguring poetry as essentially theoretical. For the Cambridge school, ‘poetic thinking’ does not involve a simple rehashing of philosophical ideas in poetic diction, but as Simon Jarvis points out, these poems instead of accommodating philosophy within their formal structures are in themselves philosophic. Such a reconsideration of the poem as a cognitive product affords a metaphysical truth that is at once noble and transcendent.