Austerity 

April 10-11, 2026 

 The 2026 edition of the Equinoxes graduate student conference at Brown University 

This year’s Equinoxes invites presentations on literary, visual, and theoretical works that engage in, refuse, reorient or exaggerate the aesthetic, economic and moral senses of the word “austerity.” From the strictures of classical metre and modernist minimalisms, to the rigor of Cartesian doubt, the stripping away of excess marks an enduring fantasy for writers and thinkers alike. Yet if austerity is understood as a denial of material resources, one has to ask: in a philosophical and literary context, what are these resources, and to whom are they denied? How do austerity measures reproduce or indulge the very excesses they eschew? This conference takes as its point of departure the hypothesis that austerity peeks begrudgingly at its antonyms from the corner of its eye; it exists in strange contiguity with what it shuns: decadence, luxury, waste, frivolity, degeneracy, destructive passion and perversion.

How does the restriction of detail and ornamentation in literary works give way to a Baroque-like excess? Reciprocally, how might the maximalist aesthetics of the Baroque proceed from a concern for eschatological barrenness? We are especially interested in papers that stage the irony or performativity of austerity; readings that, in a Bataillean spirit, address the hyperbolic tendencies in its self-restraint or reinscribe the lack of measure in its severity. For, austerity seems to betray itself, becoming enraptured by the ecstasy of its own excess. We encounter this excess sometimes through its negation, as in Montaigne, Molière, Flaubert or Balzac's warnings against elevating temperance or frugality to the height of moral absolutes; or, when stylistic restraint is led to its deconstructive paroxysms in Robbe-Grillet, Duras or Beckett. The nineteenth-century novel often balances the material luxury of bourgeois life against its spiritual dearth; the abundance of imported exotic commodities and orientalist imagery reserve as their flip-sides accounts of colonial scarcity and prosaic sobriety. One might also think of the austere tendencies of twentieth-century literary criticism, which, wanting to rid itself of historicism and declaring the death of the author, regains the ascetic scene of a reader alone with her text as the highest luxury. 

As an interdisciplinary conference, Equinoxes encourages submission from a variety of fields and critical perspectives, including but not limited to literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, history, classics, media studies, sensory studies, disability studies, art history, religious studies, women's gender, and sexuality studies, (post and de)colonial studies. We invite proposals that sit comfortably within the domain of French and Francophone studies, or that depart either from its center or from its margins to read for and against austerity in areas of study that comprise, but are not limited to:

• Manuscript illumination and medieval marginalia

• Resource scarcity and ecological disaster

• Blank pages and canvasses 

• Negative theology 

• Comedies of manners

• Renaissance and Baroque drama

• Travel, exoticism and empire 

• Queer and trans negativity

• The modern university

• Rhetorical figures and their economies

• Notions of property, propriety and frivolity in the philosophy of language

• Critical theory and political economy 

• Purity, piety, and moral rigor

• The Gothic/monstrosity 

• Realism and materialism

Papers may be in French or English. Please send 250-word abstracts and a few lines of biography to equinoxes-conference@brown.edu by January 15, 2026.