A Young Girl Reading, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (c. 1776)
Date: Wednesday 16 October 2013
Time: 2.00-5.00pm
Venue: Learning and Innovation Building (17-202A)
University of Queensland St Lucia Campus
Presenter: Prof. Deidre Lynch (University of Toronto)
For further information and to RSVP: email Eric Parisot
Abstract: This master class sets out to consider literary studies' recent engagements with affect, emotion, empathy, and love and the relationship between those engagements and the discipline's current restiveness with the project of critique. One project I hope to pursue in our discussions is to investigate the extent to which this "affective turn" replays eighteenth-century justifications of literary experience and literary attachments and what consequences might follow from that replaying. Another project we might undertake is to consider the field's recent emphasis on the work of feeling in relationship to work per se: how might the new accounts of "how we read now" be enriched by a consideration of affective labour's role in the economy and the university? Here too the eighteenth-century prehistory of literary subjectivity might be illuminating.
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