The ancient Greek concept of parrhesia, or “fearless speech,” examined by Michel Foucault in a series of later lectures, has generated a steady stream of scholarship from a variety of perspectives: philosophical, political, social, even personal. Considering instances of parrhesia in literary texts can help us understand the underlying tensions between oppression and resistance, especially for those figures whose parrhesia takes the form of refusal. In "Unruly Truth: On Parrhesia and/as Political Refusal," Sergej Seitz draws on Bonnie Honig’s A Feminist Theory of Refusal, in particular her ideas about “intensification,” to argue that “excessive intensification is at stake in the notion of parrhesia.” On the one hand, the parrhesiast “refuses to remain silent or to comply [with] the norms of appropriacy, even in face of the gravest dangers for their own life, thus exposing their own vulnerability and the otherwise conventional act of telling intensifying the truth.” However, the refusal to be silent, when coupled with intensification, “may help envisage truth-telling as an intense, agonal practice that does not establish unalterable foundations (which is the classical depoliticizing function of truth) but is itself part of world-building refusal practices.” In other words, the act of parrhesiastic refusal can actually provide an alternative to the existing status quo. This session seeks papers that explore the ways parrhesia or fearless speech manifests as refusal and intensification in literary texts across a range of periods and geographical/cultural areas. Papers might consider the following questions: What form does the refusal and intensification take in the text(s)? How does the parrhesiastes go beyond simple truth utterance and offer the potential for meaningful social change? How might the strategies proffered in the text(s) provide new ways to think about the dialectic of oppression and resistance?

Submit your250-word abstract and brief bio here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22562 by Sept. 30, 2026. This session is hybrid (in-person but accepting remote presentations).

Session Organizer and Chair: Mary Balkun (mary.balkun@shu.edu)