(Un)Pretty: Interrogations of Beauty in Literature

Call for Proposals

York University English Graduate Students Association Conference

May 10th, 2024

In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry writes:

Something beautiful fills the mind yet invites the search for something beyond itself, something larger or something of the same scale with which it needs to be brought into relation. Beauty, according to its critics, causes us to gape and suspend all thought… But simultaneously what is beautiful prompts the mind to move chronologically back in the search for precedents and parallels, to move forward into new acts of creation, to move conceptually over, to bring things into relation, and does all this with a kind of urgency as though one’s life depended on it. (29-30)

Beauty is many things: an aesthetic principle, a quality engendering joy and pleasure in both the beholder and the beheld, a standard against which objects and persons are valued, and an instrument that constrains what can be imagined if they do not meet that standard. Beauty demands response and incites desire – it holds out a promise, but who is this promise for, what are its possibilities, who gets to make it, and what horizons are disclosed in its reneging? As an aesthetic category the valuations of beauty are contested and unstable, compelling us to pay attention to surfaces and their pleasures, and to the ethics and politics they propose. Beauty possesses and evokes, challenges and commands, discerns and excludes, suspends and transforms. It calls for recognition, description, and imitation, and as an image of freedom, makes no guarantees. The York University English Graduate Students Association invites proposals for conference papers exploring the topic of beauty and its representations.

There are an expansive range of questions to consider, including: How do the creative and destructive capacities of beauty act on the cultural psyche? How does beauty relate to the apprehension of other aesthetic qualities and the productive disruptions of negative and antagonistic affects?How have we described beauty, and what does literature have to tell us about its potential, its effects, and its failures? How does language stage the event of beauty, and affect the way readers experience, parse, and participate in a literary work? How do we coordinate the passive/active dynamic in the relation between beauty as performance and beauty as constituted by the gaze? If there is a politics of aesthetics there is also an aesthetics of politics, and what, in the end, do we dare to hope from our experiences of beauty and its recognitions?

If you aren’t quite sure your proposal falls under the aegis of this topic, send it to us anyway – we encourage approaches that challenge the borders of what we can expect. Inter- trans- and cross-disciplinary work is welcome, and we invite our colleagues at both the MA and PhD level to participate in an in-person roundtable guided by some of the questions posed above, and to discuss the fruitful ways in which their work might be in conversation with each other. We will also be hosting a Creative Writing Panel, and encourage the submission of proposals for creative or hybrid critical/creative work that engages with this topic.

Some examples of subject matter for papers include:

·         Literary representations of beauty across any periods and genres (beauty in the adolescent imagination; 17th – 19th-century sensibilities and the cultivation of aesthetic communities; beauty, romance, and the Romantic; beauty and its role in trans and queer texts, as well as texts approached through the lenses of disability studies, etc.)

·         The economies of beauty, the production of femininity, the conditioning of desire, etc.

·         Social media, influencer culture, neoliberal appropriations of beauty, etc.

·         The limits of beauty: body horror, the grotesque and sublime, etc.

·         Beauty as it appears in graphic novels and modes of illustration

·         Pathologies of beauty, the medicalizations of beauty, etc.

·         Alternative aesthetics and the rerouting of beauty (Programs of aesthetic education; the disruptions of the Black aesthetic; alternative humanisms and their structures of feeling; the conventions of white femininity, etc.)

·         Nature, beauty, and the Anthropocene

·         Forms of literary beauty: poetics, mise en page, materiality of language, etc.

·         Critical approaches including affect theory, post-critique, etc.

This hybrid conference will take place at York University and online on May 10, 2024. Please submit proposals that include an abstract of up to 250 words, a brief bio that includes your institutional affiliation and the title of your paper. Send proposals to egsaconference2024@gmail.com no later than March 1st, 2024. Visit www.egsaconference2024.com for more details and updates.