C19 2024 Panel CFP: “Endlessness”

Writing about Henry David Thoreau’s Journal as a “workshop of being,” François Specq describes the massive text as developing “permanent discontinuity and asymmetry, arrhythmia and no repetition within repetition, as a celebration of uninterrupted creation, surging up, random, endless, inevitable.” The very task of daily journal-keeping assumes endlessness, at least until the end of one’s own life. Even then, the massive corpus contains the raw material for renewed interpretations and discoveries long after the final entry was penned. Beyond journal-keeping, Walt Whitman’s continuous revision of Leaves of Grass, Frederick Douglass’s and W. E. B. Du Bois’s multiple autobiographies, and countless unfinished works from multiple authors give the impression of the nineteenth century as littered with uncompleted, seemingly fragmented projects and texts. 

This panel seeks perspectives on forms of “endlessness” in various modes: as a means of interpretation, a critique of progress, a political exercise, an ecological formulation, etc. Papers may consider different seemingly endless genres (the fragment, the cliffhanging novel); the theme of endlessness in political, philosophical, and scientific discourse; the affect of endlessness; interpretation and critique as an endless practice; anti-teleology; open-ended pedagogy; or other relevant themes.

Please submit a 250–300 word abstract along with a brief bio to thomas.howard@wustl.edu by August 15, 2023.