This conference is a hybrid event. Presenters, faculty, students, and staff from the NYU and IUDC communities, and members of the general public, may attend in-person with prior registration via this RSVP link.
Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference at the Department of German, NYU (April 27-28, 2023)
Location: Deutsches Haus at NYU
Organized by: Aviv Hilbig-Bokaer and Francesco Mercuri (NYU German)
Keynote: Ian Fleishman, University of Pennsylvania
The ailing body as a site of decadence and decay is a troubling reoccurrence in literary history. Through various media and discursive practices, the body in various states of transformation has been constituted as plastic, fallible, malfunctioning, and vulnerable. These intersecting modalities have long rendered the body a fertile site of theoretical and critical analysis. Jean-Luc Nancy reminds us that, “[the] body is made of flesh, gestures, forces, passions, techniques, powers, impulses; it is dynamic, energetic, economic, politic, sensuous, esthetic—but it is no one of those meanings as such.” This conference invites diverse relational approaches to the body as a contested process of declining and its various positions and potentialities.
Writers across genres and time periods have explored bodily decline, injury, and physical illness, situating textuality as an act of simultaneous constitution and de-constitution of corporeality, dialectically questioning and affirming identities. Literary practice attends to, and accounts for, these corporeal shortcomings in numerous incongruous ways: constitutively, curatively, ironically, and cynically, for instance. From Modernism’s interrogation of industrialization and labor as a bodily practice, to mid-20th century literature’s processing political and gender violence, through philosophical inquiries of the living, thinking with the body and its ailments has been a generative means of examining cultural production.
Attending to the ways in which literature has produced questions of corporeal ailment through failure, injury, and liability invites theoretical approaches which include gender and queer theory, critical disability studies, decolonial interventions, and psychoanalysis. In thinking through the various positionalities of the body in decline this conference will draw a critical eye to the politics and postures of declining. Approaches from literary studies, art history, cultural studies, performance studies, cinema studies and philosophy among other fields are welcomed.
Please click here for the full conference abstract.
Please click here for the conference schedule.
The University’s COVID-19 vaccination requirements—that all members of the NYU community, including employees, faculty members, students, affiliates, vendors, and visitors, must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and, once eligible, boosted—remain in force.
All visitors must be prepared to present proof of compliance with the University’s COVID-19 vaccination requirements if asked to do so.
Please RSVP here.
This event is sponsored by the NYU Department of German. Additional support provided by NYU GSAS Dean's Office, NYU GSAS Office of Academic and Student Affairs, Deutsches Haus at NYU and the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).
