Call For Papers: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism

[Judith Kalb]

Fourth Annual 
University of South Carolina Comparative Literature Conference

"The Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and Cultural Criticism in the Twenty-First Century"

Keynote Speaker:Slavoj Zizek (Lubijana)
Plenary Speakers: Julia Kristeva (Paris VII)
**** ***Toril Moi (Duke)
**** ***Kaja Silverman (Berkeley) *

****This conference initiates a conversation about the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas in the twenty-first century. *Why do some of us continue to have a desire for psychoanalysis? *What is the nature of that desire? *What can psychoanalysis teach us about the social arrangements of our increasingly globalized world, and especially, about the psychic origins of our most pressing social problems (racism, sexism, homophobia, nationalistic violence, terrorism, genocide)? *Do psychoanalytic theories have anything to say about the highly "dispersed" identities of new information technologies? *Or do those theories remain too invested in embodied identities grounded in what Freud calls "the bodily ego"? *Finally, can psychoanalytic accounts of creativity and agency offer resources for cultural critique? *Can they help us resist the fashionable pessimism that sees the new global culture as inevitable? *Or is analysis in some basic way conservative, concerned with accommodating subjects to the norms of the societies in which they live?

****Presentations should be broadly interdisciplinary. *In order to encourage full participation, we will not run parallel sessions. *The conference will end with a roundtable in which we try collectively to pull together the threads of our discussion--and to assess where our desires have led us. *We plan to publish selected papers from the conference in a collection of essays with a major university press.

****Pleasesend abstacts of 20-minute papers by 30 September 2002 to: Paul Allen Miller, Chair, Comparative Literature Program, Humanities Building, Columbia, SC 29208.

Sponsored by the University of South Carolina College of Liberal Arts, Program in Comparative Literature, Department of English, and associated departments and programs.

Please post.

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