'desire, literature, culture' - postgraduate symposium

Event Details

Abstracts of not more than 300 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note, should be sent to dlc2012@um.edu.mt by 13th February 2012

Might desire be in decline? At first glance the suggestion seems almost preposterous: we live in an age in which near-instant gratification has, on many levels, never been so widely available, keenly desired or insistently promised. The past century has seen the development of a highly theorised understanding of desire as well as the emergence and astonishingly rapid growth of the various culture industries that sustain the ever increasingly complex economy of wish-fulfilment that structures our daily lives, reinforcing what seems to be the contemporary injunction par excellence, namely to ‘enjoy’ or ‘consume’. One might even be inclined to look back upon modernism itself as marking the emergence of the literary text, and the artwork more generally, as a self-absorbed exploration and cultivation of memory and desire, which is then taken to its self-reflexive, playfully autotelic and freely libidinal extreme by postmodernism. And yet there seems to be a pervading sense that desire is not what it used to be.

Could it be that we are quite literally spoilt for choice? That desire is either coming to be sated or is now in some sense vitiated or impoverished, and that, in any case, there is – and perhaps has always been – something unsatisfying about the satisfaction of desire? Moreover, if – and we ought not to take this for granted – the preceding century traces the undulating rise and fall of desire, how has this been reflected in literature, theory and culture? From the current crisis in global capitalism, to the academy’s critical default of post[–]ist discourse, to a cursory glance at recent, notable publications – Living in the End Times, What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Theory after ‘Theory’, The Poetics of Disappointment, On Late Style, The Philosophy of Boredom, Living with Indifference – it is impossible to escape the pervading sense of an ending (to echo deliberately both the title of Julian Barnes’ 2011 Man Booker winner and Frank Kermode’s influential study of literature and apocalypse).

Or might it be the case that desire is alive and well but simply elsewhere, constituting alternative sites of cultural and political expression? Might this, for instance, account for the popularity of grassroots politics – from Occupy Wall Street to the so-called Arab Spring – at a time when political apathy has supposedly never been greater? What, then, are the sites of desire today and how are they figured in literature and culture? How, in particular, are literature and culture negotiating the redirected flows of desire of the digital age?

If, however, our contemporary cultural reality is indeed marked by ‘vanishing desire’ (Lacan) or ‘the disappearance of desire’ (Žižek), then, at least on one reading, we live in the tension between fantasy and anxiety. How, in such a context, might both literature and culture be seen to be responding to Lacan’s imperative not to give way on one’s desire? This conference invites papers that respond to these issues and to the topic of desire, literature and culture more generally.

Papers may discuss, but need not be limited to, the following topics:
• Waning/saturated desire in literature and culture
• Desire in literature and literature in desire
• Other desires – marginal, multiple, forbidden and deviant desires
• Desire and modernism/postmodernism
• Figures of desire in literature
• Desire and power
• Erotic desire
• The poetics of desire
• Desire and death
• Desire and freedom
• Desire and ideology
• Cultural desires
• Desire and cinema