Conference “Possibilities of the Cut”
NYU Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture Graduate Student Conference.
Organized by graduate students in the Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture, this conference aims to dwell on the varied and conflicting interpretations of wounds and neighboring terms: on the cuts, gashes, stigmata, fractures, ruptures, incisions, slits, scratches (and the scars that they sometimes permanently leave), marking the material and textual body.
How does injury make itself readable, visible, and audible? In what ways is it also opaque, illegible, and puzzling? What are the ethics and aesthetics of narration when it engages with states of woundedness and vulnerability caused by colonialism, displacement, migration, exile? How are acts of wounding used to give rise to narratives of perverse or masochistic enjoyment or promise a new relation to oneself and to the other in literary, philosophical and/or psychoanalytic discourses? In other words, this conference will explore “Possibilities of the Cut,” a title borrowed From Eva Hayward’s Essay “More Lessons From a Starfish,” to study the modes of storytelling shaped by experiences of wounding— whether physical, psychological, historical, or metaphorical — and to interrogate the critical reflexes to which they give rise.
Time: 10:00 am EST
Free!
