[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Reading and Touch (3/1/06; collection)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

From: ejarosin@rci.rutgers.edu

CALL FOR PAPERS
Reading and Touch

Essays are invited for a collection on the conjunction of  Reading and 
Touch.
The collection is designed to navigate the contemporary labyrinth of
ever-proliferating aesthetic ideologies with the specific aim of 
reassessing
how we read�both how texts touch us, and we them.

Overall, the essays in this volume will offer a prolonged meditation on the
status of the text as we have inherited it from theory. Theory has 
transformed
the text into an aesthetic object that is a mute interlocutor exposed to
infinite indeterminacy. Contemporary critical thought has redrawn the 
map of the
senses in relation to cognition, expanding its range once dominated by 
sight. It
will be recalled that for poststructuralism the figure of the reader is the
scribe�another copying, repeating, the mute text. The 
poststructuralist
reader, in some ways, comes to guard the meaning of the text through a 
manual
mimesis, through a repetition of the hand. The popular notion of repetition,
which has shaped the critical imagination of the past few decades, with its
affiliated
notions of iterability, performativity, and redescription, far from 
eclipsing
the sense of touch, has prepared us to its re-evaluation. Any discussion of
reading after theory should avoid the nostalgia sometimes associated 
with close
reading and instead capitalize on the opportunity, offered by contemporary
modernity, to re-evaluate touch. How does this renewed if unexplored 
attention
to the hand and the tactile change our understanding of interpretative acts?

The tone of the collection. We want to avoid the pitfalls of nostalgia that
discussions of reading after theory often seem to entail. Instead, we 
seek to
encourage our authors to play the keys of the present in as a nuanced a 
way as
possible, avoiding ideological rigidity. The collection would like to be a
space for all those who have come to form strong beliefs about
reading�and its contiguous activities (writing, interpreting)�
motivated by the wish to preserve,  further explore, and recast its 
status as a
human affect.

We welcome contributions in English from different approaches, from the 
thematic
to the theoretical, the philological to the psychoanalytical, and the
interdisciplinary to the creative, by scholars and artists alike.


We are considering dividing the collection into the following sections:

1. The materiality of the signifier and interpretation. Some would argue 
that
ours is a post-hermeneutic world in which the materiality of the 
signifier has
destroyed the possibility of interpretation understood as contending 
beliefs or
ideologies. In fact, from this point of view the materiality of the 
signifier
turns out to be the logic of contemporary globalization and the reign of 
terror.
This section will take up the debate on the materiality of the 
signifier, which
from the 1960s to the 21st century has been on the rise, and whether the
materiality of the signifier, its shape, and thus its sensory experience 
have
replaced the depth of interpretation (see, for example, the work of 
Walter Benn
Michaels).

2. Reading and the supports of painting. How does reading materialize 
into paint
(for example in the tradition of Jasper Johns reading Hart Crane or Frank
O'Hara)? How does text become texture? This section will be devoted to the
treatment of painting supports as if they were a page (think, for 
example, of
Helen Frankenthaler�s Ideas)

3. Reading as Photography. We have inherited from the 
twentieth-century--we are
thinking of Walter Benjamin, among others--a mode of literary criticism 
that can
best be described as the conjoining of the collector's instinct and the
photographer's avid gaze. This section will be devoted to reading as
reconsidered within the limits of an age of increased circulation of 
images and
the production of the spectacular. Can an exploration of touch (and 
surface and
materiality) offer a new dimension to contemporary analyses of visual 
culture?

3. The hand in literature. Thematic analyses of the hand in novels, 
poems, etc.,
both as a metaphor and as an allegory for rethinking the way in which we 
engage
with the text itself.

4. Reading and love. Reading considered as an affect that generates writing.
This section will focus on the  amorous relation between reading and 
writing. It
is believed that such an affinity does not  fall within the realm of 
literary
criticism (think of Wellek) despite the fact that it has been a main 
force of
critical discourse for many decades (think of Barthes).

5. Touching the manuscripts. The influence of the material aspects of
manuscripts on writing an interpretation.


Abstracts due: March 1, 2006
Send abstracts to:

Eric Jarosinski
Rutgers University
ejarosin@rci.rutgers.edu

G. F. Mitrano
University of Maryland in Europe
mena.mitrano@tin.it






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