Pleasure in the Text — Pleasure of the Text
CALL FOR PAPERS
Skepsi’s Third International and Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference
University of Kent in Paris
Pleasure in the Text — Pleasure of the Text
17 April 2010, Paris, Reid Hall Campus
Just as we seek pleasure in our daily lives, so, as readers, we seek
pleasure in literary texts. We may look for and discover pleasure in
the content of the text — that is, in representations of emotions,
situations or images — but we may also look for it in the form
of the language that attempts to capture them.
How do the content and the form of a literary text stimulate
readerly pleasure? Hegel sought aesthetic delight in the ideal of an ‘immanently
harmonious and self-reliant’ narrative. Barthes suggested that
the pleasure of the text is independent of ‘the logic of understanding’ and
alluded to its equivocation by calling it ‘a drift, something
both revolutionary and asocial […] something neuter’. For
his part, Lacan advanced the view that language is asymptotic to carnal
pleasure and that the text will never successfully communicate the peculiarity
of this experience.
To what extent — if at all — can intellectual, aesthetic,
erotic or sexual pleasure be represented in or by a text? What textual
devices can be used to convey pleasure? Does the contemporary proliferation
of different media further problematise the relationship between pleasure
and text? Are different media capable of conveying different pleasures?
Do the pleasure and the methods of its representation evolve in a temporal
and spatial sense?
The conference theme, ‘The Pleasure in and of the
Text’, can be interpreted in many ways. We invite potential speakers
to enquire into the sources and conditions of the reader’s jouissance and
to analyse its various forms as well as to explore the possibilities,
temptations and risks of reproducing the ‘real life’ pleasure.
The conference will have an international and interdisciplinary character. The following
list is neither prescriptive nor exhaustive:
- Comparative Literature
- Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Philosophy of Language
- Continental and Analytical Philosophy
- Aesthetics and Visual Arts
- Gender Studies
Abstract proposals (max. 300 words) for twenty-minute papers in English
should be sent as a Microsoft Word attachment to the conference organising
committee at: pleasure2010@kent.ac.uk
The email should include the name of the author, institution
and a short bio. You should also indicate in your proposal any audiovisual
requirements you may have.
The deadline for abstract submission is 20 January 2010.
Funding may be available for University of Kent speakers.
Check application form at http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/local/graduate/docs/Forms%20Research/Research%20and%20conference%20trips.pdf
Selected papers will be considered for publication in
the fifth issue of the on-line research journal Skepsi.
http://www.kent.ac.uk/secl/journals/skepsi/index.html
http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/skepsi/