This seminar departs from the idea that we need a clearer understanding of elemental forms—traditional and non-traditional—that are in different stages of becoming formless (loss, disappearance, transmutation etc.). On the one hand, we build up on the critical genealogy of the formless (l’informe), a concept once popularized by Bataille in the surrealist journal Documents (1929-30) and later taken up by Bataille’s readers, most famously by Rosalind Krauss & Yves-Alain Bois (1997) and Georges Didi-Huberman (1995). While, on the other hand, we also welcome proposals that conceptualize the formless through different disciplinary vantage points and bring it to bear on the question of elemental forms.

Call for Papers, The Profession at CEA 2022

March 31-April 2, 2022 | Birmingham, Alabama

Sheraton Hotel, Birmingham | 2201 Richard Arrington Jr Blvd N, Birmingham, AL 35203

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on The Profession for our 52nd annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

Is theoretical resistance to totality still viable today, in this moment of totalizing crisis? How might we reclaim totality as a conceptual ground that can account for the relationship between experience, on the one hand, and the historical-material processes that shape cultural production, on the other? Almost a century after György Lukács reinstated the concept at the very center of Marx’s project, and some four decades since the publication of Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, we are compelled to ask: how might we think about cultural production, circulation, and consumption in relation with, rather than in opposition to, totality? 

The critical (re)turn to negation has provoked unprecedented attention to hope and hopelessness as key terms of contemporary living and dying. In her monograph on ecological crisis and political theology, Catherine Keller argues that hope must be decoupled from optimism. Where optimism and pessimism determine their outcomes in advance, hope takes root in uncertainty and remains there. The point of hope is, after all, that we cannot know how something will go.