BABEL Conference 2010 Call for Papers
1st Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group
after the end: medieval studies, the humanities, and the post-catastrophe
4-6 November 2010
University of Texas at Austin
[co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, University of Texas at Austin, College of Charleston, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, andPalgrave Macmillan]
[See conference program here]
abandoned building, post-Chernobyl disaster (Prypiat, Ukraine)
That a major shift in the role and function of the intellectual is occurring is clear. What it will have come to have meant is an issue upon which those in the University should attempt to have an impact. An attention to this problematic is necessary. How we pay attention to it is not determined. Therein lies the freedom and the enormous responsibility of Thought at the end of the twentieth century, which is also the end of what has been the epoch of the nation-state. (Bill Readings, The University in Ruins)
One thinks in the Humanities the irreducibility of their outside and of their future. One thinks in the Humanities that one cannot and must not let oneself be enclosed within the inside of the Humanities. But for this thinking to be strong and consistent requires the Humanities. (Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition”)
This conference will bring together medievalists with scholars and theorists working in later periods in the humanities in order to collectively take up the broad question of what happens “after the end,” by which we mean after the end of the affair, the end of the world, and everything in between. After gender, sex, love, the family, the nation-state, the body, the human, language, truth, feeling, reason, ethics, modernity, politics, religion, God, the nation-state, secularism, liberalism, the humanities, the university, teleology, progress, history, historicism, narrative, meaning, the individual, singularity, theory, practice, what else is there? Here, we mean to hopefully inspire a set of discussions and debates relative to the “post” of the subjects we study within (and beyond) the humanities: can we really ever be “after” anything, and if so, in what (productive and/or perilous) ways, and what next? We are also interested in cultivating some ruminations upon Teresa de Lauretis’s call in 2o03 at the symposium organized by Critical Inquiry, that
now may be a time for the human sciences to reopen the questions of subjectivity, materiality, discusivity, knowledge, to reflect on the post of posthumanity. It is a time to break the piggy bank of saved conceptual schemata and reinstall uncertainty in all theoretical applications, starting with the primacy of the cultural and its many “turns”: linguistic, discursive, performative, therapeutic, ethical, you name it. . . . Perhaps there can be no survival without the gnawing, dull pain of betrayal. Perhaps only betrayal leads to the apprehension of otherness and another cognition of the now. But do not ask me how or what, not yet.
Further, for medievalists especially, but also for modernists, can we really ever be “after history” or “post-historical,” and if so, what would now count as the Real of our studies; if not, in what ways do history and historicism still matter? Read more 
BABEL collection: Fragments Toward a History of a Vanishing Humanism
Fragments Toward a History of a Vanishing Humanism
Editors: Eileen A. Joy and Myra J. Seaman
BOOK DESCRIPTION
What qualifies as a human, as a human subject, as human speech, as human desire?
—Judith Butler[1]
. . . as scholars and teachers we believe we are right to call what we do “humanistic” and what we teach “the humanities.” Are these still serviceable phrases, and if so in what way? How then may we view humanism as an activity in light of its past and probable future?
—Edward Said[2]
For a long while now, there has been a significant turn both to and beyond “the human” (or, the liberal humanist subject) in aesthetic, historical, philosophical, sociological, and more scientific studies—a turn, moreover, which is also often accompanied by a nod to post-histoire, or the “end of history.” This poses a great challenge to those concerned with the future of humanistic letters and education, especially when, as the philosopher of religion John Caputo has written, “one has lost one’s faith in grand récits,” and “being, presence, ouisa, the transcendental signified, History, Man—the list goes on—have all become dreams.” Read more
BABEL @ Kalamazoo 2010 (the photographic evidence)
BABEL Suite Late-Night Goings-On: Kalamazoo 2010
[specific individuals are not identified in photos so as to protect the pure and the unholy]
Kalamazoo 2010: BABEL & postmedieval sessions
Abandoned, Never Completed Hotel (North Taiwan)
45th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
13-16 May 2010 Kalamazoo, MI
[See informal photos of BABEL at Kalamazoo 2010, if you dare]
I. BABEL Working Group panels:
1. Session 444: On The Question of Style (Roundtable)
Saturday, May 15th @ 1:30 p.m. (Fetzer 1005)
Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville), Organizer and Presider
In recent years we have had some provocative experiments in style in medieval studies. In her book The Shock of Medievalism, Kathleen Biddick stages an imagined conversation between the Venerable Bede, a Stanford dean, a professor of Old English, and a Chicana feminist critic in order to write a “historical poetics of mourning and rememoration.” In his book Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Cohen tells a personal story about the catastrophe of 9/11 and his son’s anxieties over his father’s travels that is intimately connected to the larger purpose of his book: to describe the “possible bodies” of both the Middle Ages and our own times. Cohen also re-tells the history of Alfred’s struggles with the Vikings through Alfred’s hemorrhoids. In her review of David Wallace’s Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn, Jenna Mead terms Wallace’s critical mode ficto-criticism, a “genre that inserts autobiographical self-realization into theoretically-conscious critical scholarship . . . rethinking the generic and thus intellectual boundaries of canonical criticism.” In her book Getting Medieval: Sexual Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, Carolyn Dinshaw recounts her own history as a lesbian student at Princeton to partially describe her scholarly and personal orientation to the work of the gay medieval historian John Boswell, which then forms one of many openings to a newly fashioned affective, queer historiographical practice. Read more
It’s Never Enough, or, On Being Fucked Up
Figure 1. Jules Dalou, detail from Triomphe du Silène (1898)
It’s Never Enough, or, On Being Fucked Up
Eileen A. Joy
45th International Congress on Medieval Studies (13-16 May 2010)
Session 57 Post-Absymal I: Exegesis, Ethics, Saturation
for Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950-2009)
Eagles of coral
adorn the ebony bed
where Nero lies fast asleep—
callous, peaceful, happy,
in the prime of his body’s strength,
in the fine vigor of youth.
But in the alabaster hall that holds
the ancient shrine of the Aenobarbi,
how restless the household gods!
They tremble, the little Lares,
and try to hide their insignificant bodies.
They’ve heard a terrible sound,
a deadly sound coming up the staircase,
iron footsteps that shake the staircase;
and now, faint with fear, the miserable Lares
scramble to the back of the shrine,
shoving each other and stumbling,
one little god falling over another,
because they know what kind of sound that is,
know by now the footsteps of the Furies.
—C.P. Cavafy, “Footsteps”[1]
I. Alcibiades’s Bitten Heart
As Jonathan Lear has written, Plato’s Symposium “is the only attempt ever made to plumb the philosophical significance of party-crashing.”[2] With Lear, I do not view Alcibiades’s interruption of the party and its speeches as either “incidental farce”[3] or merely a comic affirmation of the wisdom of Socrates’ supposedly disembodied and more “rational” enlightenment. Read more
announcing postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies
Everyone is reading postmedieval:
A note of thanks to all who made this journal possible: “On Natality and the As If”
[See postmedieval site at Palgrave for more information on upcoming issues, submissions, etc.]
Follow postmedieval on Twitter!
postmedieval volume 1 issues 1-2: When Did we Become Post/human?
Volume 1, Issues 1-2: When Did We Become Post/human?
Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Craig Dionne(Eastern Michigan Univ.)
This issue is designed as a dialogue with Katherine Hayles’s 1999 book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and features medieval and early modern approaches to the question of the historicity of the post/human as an intellectual, social, cultural, philosophical, and scientific category of thought as well as a state of material reality. The issue also seeks to demonstrate that contemporary discourses on the post/human raise a host of troubling questions relative to issues of embodiment, subjectivity, cognition, sociality, sexuality, spirituality, self-determination, collectivization, expression, representation, well-being, ethics, governance, technology, and the like for which pre- and early modern history and culture provide important resources for critical reflection. The issue features Katherine Hayles, Andy Mousley, and Kate Soper as Respondents.
Embracing the Swerve: A Fugitive Medieval Studies
by EILEEN JOY
I want to emphasize that historicism has served the medievalist well for so long because it is both rigorous and flexible. It does not denote a monolithic practice–and there is no “other” to it: meaning that historicism has to be part of any critical encounter with the past. It is the sine qua non that enables other, potentially unhistorical modes.
–Jeffrey J. Cohen, “Time Out of Memory,” The Post-Historical Middle Ages
Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier. This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce, is this not a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications?
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
As promised to everyone at NYU and here at In The Middle, I have now the full, somewhat expanded text of my remarks to share from the Anglo-Saxon Studies Colloquium forum on “Historicism, Post-Historicism, and Medieval Studies,” held just this past Thursday [April 1st] at New York University… [Read the rest at In the Middle]
Some Other Kind of Relation That is Not Just Possible but Already at Work: Reading, Criticism, Interpretation
by EILEEN JOY
—Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern TextSomewhat prompted by Jeffrey’s two posts on what it has meant for him to serve as Chair of his departmentand some of the frustrations attendant upon advocating to sometimes unreceptive audiences the value of literary studies within the university, and also for the importance of community and shared vision when negotiating some of the university’s largest [more global] concerns relative to funding, strategic initiatives, and mission, I cannot help but be struck at the same time by the short-sightedness and perhaps even the [possibly irresponsible, or at least, disingenuous] banality of Stanley Fish’s argument, conveyed by Mary Kate in her post “Is There a Methodology in This Class?”, that the best thing we can do with a literary text is to “find out what the author meant” [i.e., hunt for and articulate the so-called “intentionality” behind literary texts, because, in the end, texts mean what their authors say they mean]. This represents, I really believe, an incredible constriction of what literary studies are capable of doing [and at a time, historically, when literary studies are imagined not to do anything of much real “use” within the university, and humanities programs have to struggle with sometimes strangulating budget limitations]. Somewhat accidentally, I also read Fish’s comments in relation to the essay by Louis Menand, “The Ph.D. Problem,” in the recent issue of Harvard Magazine [an excerpt, actually, from his forthcoming book The Marketplace of Ideas, and thank you to both Julie Orlemanski and Jennifer Brown for posting links to this on Facebook and Twitter, respectively], where Menand describes a fairly woeful state of affairs in the world of graduate studies in literature relative to the scarcity of jobs in literary studies within the university [also related, I might add, to the shrinking numbers of English majors at the Bachelor’s level], which has partly been the outcome of the profession of literary studies becoming more and more about a certain self-isolating “professional reproduction,” with no regard for whether or not there is a viable market for the growth of overly specialized, professionalized humanities disciplines… [Read the rest at In the Middle]
SEMA 2009 BABEL Panel
35th Annual Southeastern Medieval Association Meeting
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 15-17 October 2009
Session 33: Knowing and Unknowing Pleasures
Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) and Anna Klosowska
(Miami University of Ohio),
Co-Organizers
Fig 1. Bruce Nauman, Life Death Love Hate Pleasure Pain
Panel Description:
Building on BABEL’s panel at the Kalamazoo Congress (2009), “Are We Enjoying Ourselves? The Place of Pleasure in Medieval Scholarship,” and continuing the line of questioning that emerged in the discussion at the conference and beyond (for example: at the medieval studies weblog In the Middle), this panel will address some of the questions we have raised. Foremost among them are: what is useless pleasure, what is essential pleasure, what might be dangerous pleasure, and who or what decides? Is there class in pleasure—or, as Roland Barthes might say, “Einstein on one side, Paris-Match on the other” (Mythologies, Oeuvres complètes, p. 700)? What are the ethical conditions of pleasure? While some of the presenters will focus on fascist specters that haunt the ethics/aesthetics borderlands (Finke and Shichman), others (Klosowska and Joy) propose an optimistic “coexisting multiplicities” reading where pleasure is “between everyone,” like a “little boat used by others” (Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues, pp. 2, 9). Read more
